Soon after the new chief economic advisor (CEA) was appointed in 2014, a senior finance ministry bureaucrat told me that when Narendra Modi saw the file he asked two questions. One, why did the same names keep cropping up over the years? Two, are there no economists in India?
In the end, Modi imported two economists. One is now the head of NITI Aayog and the other is the CEA. A third will soon join the Reserve Bank of India as deputy governor. Everyone assumes they will play a positive role merely because they have a foreign degree.
Had Modi
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