NEW DELHI: The government has appointed industrialists Anand Mahindra, Pankaj R Patel and Venu Srinivasan, and former IIM (Ahmedabad) professor Ravindra H Dholakia as non-official directors on the central board of the Reserve Bank. The nominations have been made for four years by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC), the RBI said in a notification.
It is worth mentioning that, in its media statement, RBI has not defined the roles and responsibility of the newly appointed members.
RBI’s affairs are governed by the central board of directors. The members of the board, chaired by RBI Governor, are appointed by the government of India as per the Reserve Bank of India Act. Anand Mahindra is the chairman of the Mahindra Group, the non-executive chairman of Mahindra & Mahindra and Tech Mahindra.
His tenure has seen the Group expand domestically and internationally into a range of major industrial sectors from automobiles and agriculture to IT and aerospace.
Mahindra has served on several bodies globally, including the Global Board of Advisors of the Council on Foreign Relations, New York and the International Advisory Council of Singapore’s Economic Development Board.
He is currently on the board of Invest India, the National Investment Promotion and Facilitation Agency. TVS Motor Company Chairman Emeritus Venu Srinivasan is an engineer and an MBA from Purdue University (USA) and took over as the CEO of Sundaram-Clayton, the holding company of TVS Motor, in 1979.
In the same year, TVS Motor Company was born and under Srinivasan’s leadership grew to be the third largest two-wheeler manufacturing unit in India. In a stock exchange filing, Zydus Lifesciences said its chairman Pankaj R Patel has been appointed as a part-time non-official director in the central board of the RBl.
Patel is already on the board of various institutions, including Invest India, member of the Mission Steering Group (MSG) — the highest policy making and steering body constituted under National Health Mission (NHM), and of the Drug Technical Advisory Board by the ministry of health & family welfare, it added. Ravindra H Dholakia was the economics area faculty at IIM Ahmedabad from September 1985 to April 2018 when he superannuated. He received the Most Distinguished Faculty Award for the year 2017-18 at IIM-A. He was a regular visiting faculty at the European Management Institute (ESCP-EAP), Paris from 2002 to 2005.
In 2016, Dholakia was appointed as an independent member of RBI’s rate setting panel Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) for four years. The official directors (full-time) of board consists of the Governor and not more than four deputy governors. The government nominates 10 non-official from various files and two government officials. Besides, there are also four non-official directors (one each from four local board of RBI).
