Civil servants at Mint Road: A legacy of leadership at the RBI helm

Economists can still look forward to filling the deputy governor's position

Since its inception in 1935, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has had 25 governors who have overseen India’s banking regulation and monetary policy formulation for close to 90 years. Of them, as many as 14 were civil servants, seven were professional economists, three were from the financial sector, and only one from the RBI cadre of officers. You may quibble over the names of a couple of the civil servants and argue that they were also trained economists. But the preponderance of members of the Indian civil service at the helm of the RBI is a fact that has