Urjit Patel will replace Raghuram Rajan as the next RBI Governor for a tenure of three years.
- Seen as a close lieutenant to Dr Rajan, Mr Patel is currently RBI's deputy governor. He will start his three-year term on September 4. (READ)
- Mr Patel, 52, joined RBI in 2013, and was given a second term in January this year. He has run the central bank's monetary policy department since 2013.
- Born on October 28, 1963, Mr Patel has an M. Phil in economics from Oxford University and a PhD in economics from Yale University in the US.
- Prior to joining RBI, Mr Patel was an adviser with The Boston Consulting Group. He spent a decade in the financial sector and was a president at Reliance Industries.
- Like Dr Rajan, Mr Patel has the International Monetary Fund on his CV, having worked at the IMF in the 1990s on desks including the US, Myanmar and India. He has also worked as a consultant to the Ministry of Finance.
- At RBI, Mr Patel headed a panel that recommended landmark changes in the monetary policy formulation of the Reserve Bank.
- Mr Patel was a key architect of a switch to using consumer prices instead of wholesale prices to measure inflation, believing them a better gauge of volatile price changes. (READ)
- Mr Patel is widely seen continuing the inflation-fighting polices of Dr Rajan. Mr Patel, according to a Nomura note, is considered a 'hawk' on his monetary policy stance. (READ)
- The new governor will take over at a time when inflation has bust out of RBI's 4 to 6 per cent range. Consumer inflation accelerated to 6.07 per cent in July, the fourth consecutive month it has stayed above RBI's near-term target of 5 per cent by March. (READ)
- Aside from controlling inflation, Mr Patel will have to follow through on efforts to clean-up banks' bad loans.
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