Rajiv Kumar (economist)


Rajiv Kumar is an Indian economist and is currently the vice-chairman of the NITI Aayog. He is the chancellor of the Gokhale Institute of Economics and Politics in Pune and founding director of Pahle India Foundation, a non-profit research organisation that specialises in policy-oriented research and analysis. Kumar is the writer of several books on India’s economy and national security. He is an economic columnist for major Indian publications and is a speaker on the Indian political economy.

Early life and education

Kumar holds a Ph.D. from the Lucknow University, which he received in 1978 and a D.Phil. in Economics from Oxford University which he received in 1981. He has Bachelor's Degree from St. Stephen college, Delhi University

Career

Kumar was appointed Senior Research Program Officer, Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations in Delhi in 1982. He returned to ICRIER as the Director and Chief Executive in Feb 2006 and continued to be until August 2010. He was a professor in Indian Institute of Foreign Trade from 1987 to 1989.
He was appointed as the Senior Consultant, Bureau of Costs and Prices and served the Ministry of Industry, Government of India from 1989 to 1991. He served as the Economic Advisor in the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Government of India, from 1992 to 1995. In 1995, he joined the Asian Development Bank in Manila as a Principal Economist, where he served until 2005. He worked for the Confederation of India Industries as the Chief Economist for 2 years from 2004 – 2006. He was the Secretary General at the FICCI from 2010 to 2012. He became a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi from 2013 until January 2017.