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As an unprecedented fight plays out between the RBI and the government, it is the central bank’s 18 board members who are being keenly watched for their next course of action — they are not only central bankers and government officials but also business leaders, economists and activists.
The RBI board is scheduled to meet next on November 19 amid an ongoing tussle with the government on multiple fronts.
Going by the public utterances of the RBI and government officials so far, the contentious issues are how to manage the huge surplus the RBI has accumulated, how should it deal with errant lenders and borrowers amid a persisting bad loan crisis and what could be the ‘public interest’ for the government to dictate directions so that it is not seen as an attack on the central bank’s autonomy.
As per the RBI Web site, its central board currently has 18 members, though the provision is that it can go up to 21.
The members include Governor Urjit Patel and his four deputies as ‘full-time official directors’, while the remaining 13 have been nominated by the government, including two Finance Ministry officials — Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg and Financial Services Secretary Rajiv Kumar.
Swadeshi ideologue S Gurumurthy and cooperative banker Satish Marathe, have been nominated by the government as “part-time non-official directors”.
The entire board is appointed by the government under the RBI Act, which mandates the central board with “general superintendence and direction of the Reserve Bank’s affairs”. The government can nominate 10 ‘non-official’ directors from various fields and two government officials. The four non-official directors are one each from the four regional boards of the RBI.
Besides Patel, the four official directors are NS Vishwanathan and Viral Acharya, both of whom have gone public with their direct or indirect criticism of any attempt to undermine the RBI’s autonomy, as also BP Kanungo and MK Jain.
The business leaders on the RBI board include Tata group chief Natarajan Chandrasekaran, former Mahindra group veteran Bharat Narotam Doshi, Teamlease Services co-founder Manish Sabharwal and Sun Pharma chief Dilip Shanghvi.
The other members are Sudhir Mankad (retired IAS officer), Ashok Gulati (agricultural economist), Prasanna Mohanty (ex-IAS officer and economist), Sachin Chaturvedi of Delhi-based think-tank Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS) and Revathy Iyer (a former Deputy Comptroller and Auditor General).
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