This story is from August 21, 2016

Urjit Patel: A man of many firsts, an Indian by choice

Urjit Patel: A man of many firsts, an Indian by choice
MUMBAI: The 52-year-old Urjit Patel's entry into the Reserve Bank of India as deputy governor had marked a number of firsts. He was the only deputy governor to have worked for a corporate. Also he was born in Kenya, did much of his education outside India and acquired an Indian passport only later in life.
However, these items in his dossier were addressed first by the UPA government in 2013, when he was appointed the deputy governor, and later by the Narendra Modi government, which appointed him for a fresh three-year term in January .
The consensus has been that his was an appointment based on merit given his track record.
Patel, who turns 53 in October, will also be among the youngest governors in RBI.The others to take charge at an early age include Raghuram Rajan and Chintamani Deskhmukh.
RBI governors in the past have been a combination of bureaucrats and economists.But no one has experience as well-rounded as Patel. He has worked with multilateral institutions, he has played a senior role in a domestic commercial finance institution and has been a consultant. Although he was never a bureaucrat, he has worked closely with the government having been part of several committees.
One area where Patel is completely different from his predecessor is his personality. Unlike Rajan, Patel is an introvert and rarely speaks in public or participates in public debates. Although he has been deputy governor since January 2013, he has delivered very few speeches.
Born on October 28, 1963, Patel is a PhD (economics) from Yale University (1990) and MPhil from Oxford (1986).Outside academia, Patel has had a long stint in the financial sector at IDFC where he worked between 1997 and 2006, first as an executive director and part of the startup team and subsequently as a joint CEO of the company. He was also with Reliance Industries between 2008 and 2009 as president-business development.His role at Reliance involved assessing macroeconomic risk for the overall business, strategizing commercial approaches for hydrocarbon energy companies of climate change mitigation policies.
Between 2000 and 2004, Urjit worked closely with several central and state government high-level committees, such as task force on direct taxes, ministry of finance, government of India; advisory committee (on research projects and market studies), Competition Commission of India; secretariat for the Prime Minister's task force on infrastructure; group of ministers on telecom matters; committee on civil aviation reforms; ministry of power's expert group on state electricity boards and high-level expert group for reviewing the civil & defence services pension system, government of India.
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