IITian and career bureaucrat: A look at RBI's new Governor Sanjay Malhotra

Revenue Secretary Sanjay Malhotra

Revenue Secretary Sanjay Malhotra, a 1990-batch Indian Administrative Service officer of the Rajasthan cadre, is the new Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. He will take over from Shaktikanta Das, the longest serving head of the Indian central bank.

As per an official notification, Malhotra will serve as the RBI Governor for a period of three years starting December 11, 2024.

A career bureaucrat with over 33 years with the state and central governments, Malhotra has worked in several sectors including power, finance and taxation, information technology, mines.

He took over the reins of the finance ministry's revenue department on December 1, 2022 after serving as the Secretary to the Department of Financial Services.

With a graduation in engineering in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur in 1989, Malhotra also has a Masters in Public Policy from the Princeton University in the US.

Some of his other government roles included, Chairman and Managing Director of state-run REC Limited and Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Power.

He is credited for shoring up the government's revenues after it saw a massive slump during the pandemic and for greater formalisation in the economy by bringing in more people in the tax net.

The Revenue Secretary's appointment can be seen as a wild-card entry given the widespread speculations around another extension for the incumbent Shaktikanta Das.

Malhotra will be taking over as the head of the central bank at a time when the RBI has to strike a balance between high inflation and slowing growth.

The RBI’s Monetary Policy Committee in its December-meet gave precedence to combating inflation by keeping the policy repo rate unchanged at 6.5 percent for the 11th time in a row.

While India's GDP growth slumped to an almost two-year low of 5.4 percent in the second quarter of the current fiscal, headline retail inflation surged above the RBI’s upper tolerance band of 6 percent in October, driven by a sharp uptick in food inflation.