CPR FACULTY ANALYSE
ECONOMY POLITICS

As Raghuram Rajan announces his departure not seeking a second term as RBI (Reserve Bank of India) Governor, read below the analysis to date by CPR faculty, both in the run-up to and post Rajan’s recent announcement:

In A Rajan a day in May 2016, Pratap Bhanu Mehta deconstructed the ‘institutional politics’ around the RBI governor, and what it revealed ‘about the nature of government’, writing that the premium on Rajan’s ‘public credibility’ went up considerably due to the government’s emphasis on ‘spin’.

In The Numbers RBI governor Raghuram Rajan did not get: 2014 and 282, Sanjaya Baru writes post Rajan’s announcement of returning to the University of Chicago, that it was the RBI governor’s inability to come to terms with India’s political economy that led to his exit.

Rajiv Kumar writes in The Indian Express that Rajan ‘must take his share of the blame for this unfortunate situation’, since by going public with his criticism of the government, he crossed red lines in trying to ‘combine the role of a senior policy mandarin with that of a public intellectual’.