NITI Aayog Vice-Chairman Dr. Rajiv Kumar resigned from his post recently. This great man of calm nature served NITI Aayog during his tenure of 5 years and made an incomparable contribution to the development of the country. His greatest contribution is in developing and implementing the concept of aspiration districts.
NITI Aayog’s vice-chairman Rajiv Kumar has stepped down after being at the helm of the institution for nearly five years. Kumar took charge on September 1, 2017, after his predecessor Arvind Panagariya resigned from the post. Even the aspirational district programme and the development of the Sustainable Development Goal Index for India were unveiled during his tenure, over and above at least half-a-dozen such indexes across key areas.
Dr. Rajiv Kumar is Vice Chairman, NITI Aayog, in the rank and status of a cabinet minister. He also serves as the Chancellor of Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune and Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Giri Institute of Development Studies, Lucknow. Kumar played a key role in NITI Aayog’s policymaking, with a focus on agriculture, asset monetisation, disinvestment, aspirational districts programme and electric vehicles, among others.
He was also a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, Statistical Commission and the Reserve Bank of India’s Technical Advisory Committee on Monetary Policy.
He has wide experience of having worked in academia, government, industry as well as in multilateral institutions. After completing his D.Phil at Oxford, Dr. Kumar started his academic career at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations(ICRIER), Delhi as a Program Coordinator from 1982 to 1987. He was a Professor at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT) (1987-89).
He later became the Director & CEO of ICRIER between 2006 and 2011. He served as Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research(CPR) (2013-16), Delhi. He founded the Pahle India Foundation, a non-profit making research think tank in 2013, which he also headed until 2017. His earlier stints in the government were as Senior Consultant at the Bureau of Industrial Costs and Prices(BICP), Ministry of Industry (1989-1991) and as Economic Advisor with Department of Economic Affairs(DEA), Ministry of Finance (1991-1994).
His experience in the multilateral financial institutions was with Asian Development Bank (ADB), Manila, where he spent 10 years before returning to India in 2004. He also worked as a Consultant to UNCTAD, UNIDO, and the World Bank. He was the Chief Economist of the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) from 2004-to 2006 and Secretary-General of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) from 2011 to 2013. He has served on the Central Boards of State Bank of India for two terms and on the Central Board of Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Dr. Kumar has a Ph.D. in Economics from Lucknow University (1978) and a D.Phil from Oxford University(1982).
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