Dr. D Subbarao, Governor RBI- Chief Guest, National Finance Symposium 2011- Inaugural Session

Dr. Duvvuri Subbarao assumed office as the twenty-second Governor of the Reserve Bank of India on 5 September 2008. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Subbarao served as Finance Secretary to the Government of India from April 2007 to September 2008 and as Secretary to the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council from March 2005 to March 2007.

As a member of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Dr Subbarao has been a career civil servant. Over the years of 1976-98, he worked in various positions in the state Government of Andhra Pradesh and in Government of India.

Dr Subbarao was a Lead Economist in the World Bank (1999 - 2004), where his responsibilities involved advising developing countries on public finance management. He also task managed a flagship study on decentralisation across major East Asian countries which was acknowledged as innovative policy work.

Dr Subbarao received BSc (Hons) in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and MSc in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He also has an MS in Economics from the Ohio State University (1978) and was a Humphrey Fellow studying public finance at MIT during 1982-83. He earned his PhD in Economics from Andhra University for his thesis on “Fiscal Reforms at the Sub-national Level” (1998).

Dr.  Subbarao came into the Reserve Bank just a week before the global financial crisis erupted in full in mid-September 2008. He led the Reserve Bank’s effort to mitigate the impact of the crisis on India and was actively engaged in the G-20 effort to coordinate an international response to the crisis. The challenges ahead for the Reserve Bank, as he sees them, are to bring inflation down, support the growth momentum of the Indian economy, take financial sector reforms forward and deepen financial inclusion.

Dr. Subbarao maintains a strong commitment to academic pursuits, and has written and lectured extensively on issues in public finance, decentralization and political economy of reforms at national and international fora.

 Dr. Subbarao has consented to be the Chief Guest for the 6th IIFT National Finance Symposium to be held at Mumbai.