NEW DELHI: If Shalimar Bagh, the middle-class locality in North Delhi, has given Delhi its fourth woman chief minister Rekha Gupta, it is also home to Poonam Gupta, who has been appointed as Reserve Bank of India’s fourth woman deputy governor (DG).
Late Tuesday, govt named economist Poonam Gupta as the new deputy governor of the central bank, filling up the post that had been lying vacant after Michael Patra’s term ended two-and-a-half months ago. Her appointment, with a term of three years, comes on the eve of the monetary policy meeting next week.
She is currently director general of think tank National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and is also a part-time member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, apart from being the convenor of the Advisory Council to the 16th Finance Commission.
Gupta earned a master’s degree from the Delhi School of Economics, before completing a doctorate from the University of Maryland, where Arvind Panagariya was her advisor. She is married to economist Deepak Mishra, director and CEO of think tank ICRIER.
Known to speak her mind, in a paper co-authored with Barry Eichengreen, she argued that RBI’s flexible monetary policy framework had helped manage inflation and called for keeping headline inflation as the target, amid suggestions that core inflation (excluding food and fuel) should be the focus.
In a recent paper, she also highlighted how just four states – Gujarat, Odisha, West Bengal and Maharashtra – have managed to lower the debt to gross state domestic product ratio and called for setting up fiscal councils at the state level.
Her appointment marks the return of a woman as DG after 14 years. Of the 65 deputy governors since 1935, only K J Udeshi, Shyamala Gopinath and Usha Thorat were women.