The government on June 14 appointed Mahindra & Mahindra group chairman Anand Mahindra, TVS Motor chairperson Venu Srinivasan, Zydus Lifesciences chairman Pankaj Patel and Ravindra Dholakia, a former professor of the Indian Institute of Ahmedabad, as part-time non-official directors on the central board of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
The RBI central board’s mandate is, among other things, “to regulate the issue of bank notes and keeping of reserves with a view to securing monetary stability in India and generally to operate the currency and credit system of the country to its advantage; to have a modern monetary policy framework to meet the challenge of an increasingly complex economy, to maintain price stability while keeping in mind the objective of growth.”
The board, the apex body in the RBI’s organisational structure, is primarily responsible for the oversight of the central bank. The board is appointed by the government under the provisions of the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934.
The board has 15 seats, of which five are official directors and 10 are non-official directors. RBI governor Shaktikanta Das, also the chief executive of the board, and deputy governors Mahesh Kumar Jain, MD Patra, M Rajeshwar Rao and T Rabi Sankar are the official directors.
Here are brief details of each of the 10 non-official directors:
Anand Mahindra: An alumnus of Harvard Business School, Mahindra is currently the chairman of the Mumbai-headquartered multinational conglomerate Mahindra Group. He has previously been a part of several other international bodies including the UN Global Compact Board, the Global Board of Advisors of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the World Bank Group’s Advisory Board for Doing Business. He is also a recipient of the Padma Bhushan.
Venu Srinivasan: He took over as the CEO and MD of Sundaram-Clayton, the holding company of TVS Motor Company, in 1979. Later, TVS Motor became India's third-largest maker of two-wheelers. He was appointed as a non-executive director of Tata Sons in 2016. He had served as the president of the Confederation of Indian Industry in 2009-10, president of the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers for the period 1999-2001 and chairman of the National Safety Council.
Ravindra Dholakia: A retired professor of IIM, Ahmedabad, Dholakia was a part of the central bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC) from 2016 onwards. He has been a part of various policymaking and evaluation bodies in both central and state governments. He was a member of the Sixth Central Pay Commission (2006-2008). He has contributed to various research projects of international bodies like the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, World Bank, UNDP, and the Hewlett Foundation.
Pankaj R. Patel: He is the chairman of the pharmaceutical company Zydus, headquartered in Ahmedabad, which ranks fourth in the Indian pharmaceutical industry. Patel joined the firm in 1976 and took charge of the business in 1995 after a formal separation between the two founding families.
Ajay Seth: An Indian Administrative Service officer of the Karnataka Cadre’s 1987 batch, Seth was the secretary of the department of economic affairs. A mechanical engineer by training, Seth was Bangalore Metro Rail Corp. Ltd’s managing director for three years from July 2018. He has been in the public finance and taxation domains for 18 years and in the social sector and urban transport and infrastructure sectors for almost three years each in different positions with the Union and Karnataka governments, and Asian Development Bank.
Satish Kashinath Marathe: He started his career in the Bank of India and later became chairman and CEO of United Western Bank (from 2002 to 2006). Marathe has been representing the cooperative sector in pre-budget meetings with the finance ministers for the past several years. He was also the honorary secretary of the Indian Banks’ Association in 2001.
Revathy Iyer: She was a former deputy comptroller and auditor general (government accounts) from December 2013 to May 2014. She also served as the additional deputy comptroller and auditor general (eastern states) from September 2012 to December 2013. After her retirement, Iyer worked as a director, of finance and operations, at EngenderHealth, an international non-governmental organisation, from September 2015 to March 2017.
Sachin Chaturvedi: He is director general at the Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), a New Delhi-based autonomous think tank. His works primarily focus on issues related to development cooperation policies and south-south cooperation. Chaturvedi has also worked on trade and innovation linkages with a special focus on the World Trade Organisation.
Swaminathan Gurumurthy: A chartered accountant and corporate and legal adviser by profession, Gurumurthy has also made a name in the field of journalism. He was mostly known for his investigative writing. He was also the editor of Tamil magazine Tughlak. He later said he was pressured to take up the board position in the RBI.
Sanjay Malhotra: Currently secretary, Department of Financial Services, Malhotra was previously the chairman and managing director of REC Ltd. He is an engineering graduate and holds a computer science degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and is an alumnus of Princeton University. He took over as chairman and managing director of state-run REC, one of India’s largest power sector lenders, in November 2020. He has also served as an additional secretary in the Union power ministry.
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