Eco Survey on Mon, One Day before Budget

· Fin Expert IIMA PGP 85 is the New CEA

· V Anantha Nageswaran New Chief Economic Advisor

[ABS News Service/29.01.2022]

Dr Venkatraman Anantha Nageswaran, an academic and former executive with Credit Suisse Group AG and Julius Baer Group, has been appointed as the Chief Economic Adviser (CEA) to the Government of India. He succeeds former CEA KV Subramanian who returned to academia at the end of his three-year tenure in December.

His appointment comes at a time when India’s economy is showing signs of recovery, but faces some fresh challenges due to the impact of the third wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Some of the challenges that he along with the finance ministry need to tackle include income inequality and growing unemployment among its billion-plus population.

The new CEA will be responsible for providing fresh ideas to bolster growth, investments and limiting fiscal deficit.

In his new role, Nageswaran would be required to share views on key policy matters with the finance minister as well as being the lead author of the Economic Survey, which is the annual report card of the economy that gets tabled in Parliament ahead of the budget.

Who is Venkatraman Anantha Nageswaran?

Dr Venkatraman Anantha Nageswaran is a distinguished economist involved primarily in the field of academia.

Nageswaran graduated with a post-graduate diploma in Management (MBA) from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad in 1985. He later obtained a doctoral degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1994 for his work on the empirical behaviour of exchange rates.

It may be noted that he had held several leadership roles in macro-economic and capital market research for several private wealth management institutions in Switzerland and in Singapore between 1994 and 2011.