The Union government on March 10 appointed Dr GP Samanta as the new Chief Statistician of India (CSI).
Samanta would be replacing Dr Kshatrapati Shivaji, the 1986-batch IAS officer who was holding the additional charge of CSI since September 2020 after the post fall vacant.
Samanta, as part of the new deputation, would also hold the post of Secretary in the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. His tenure would initially be of two years, BloombergQuint reported citing the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) order.
Samanta was currently deputed as an advisor in the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) department of statistics and information management.
The new CSI, notably, holds of a Masters degree from the Indian Statistical Institute and a PhD in Economics from the University of Mumbai.
For his academic work, the RBI had felicitated Samanta with the prestigious Prof. P. C. Mahalanobis award in August 2010.
"Dr. Samanta’s primary research interest includes inflation and monetary policy issues, economic modeling, forecasting (including applied time series analysis, neural networks, etc.), derivatives and risk management, financial risk modeling (credit risk and ratings, Value-at-Risk, etc.), risk-based banking regulation, measurement of economic variables/parameters, etc," an official release issued by the central bank had stated.
