Former RBI Gov Urjit Patel appointed as IMF ED

Former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Urjit Patel has been appointed as executive director at the International Monetary Fund. He has been appointed for a period of three years. He took over as the RBI governor from Raghuram Rajan in September 2016 and resigned from the post in December 2018.

Who is Urjit Patel?

Urjit Patel was born on 28 October 1963. He is a Kenyan-born Indian economist, who served as the 24th Governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 2016 to 2018 and is currently appointed as the Executive Director at the International Monetary Fund representing India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Sri Lanka.

He studied in Nairobi at Jamhuri High School, and prior to that the Gujarati community-run Visa Oshwal Primary School. He studied at the London School of Economics for a Bachelor of Science degree in 1984. He obtained an M.Phil. degree from University of Oxford in 1986. He was conferred a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1990. He was at IMF India Desk during the 1991–94 transition period.

After obtaining his Ph.D., Patel joined the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1990, where he worked on the US, India, Bahamas and Myanmar desks till 1995. Thereafter he went on deputation from the IMF to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), where he played an advisory role in the development of the debt market, banking sector reforms, pension fund reforms, and targeting of real exchange rate.