The award committee, comprising AM Khusro, chairman of the Eleventh Finance Commission, SL Rao, chairman of the Central Electricity Regulatory Authority, and SR Hashim, member-secretary of the Planning Commission, unanimously recommended the name of governor Rangarajan for the honour.

The award is conferred annually on renowned economists who satisfy three major criteria: excellence in teaching, excellence in research, and significant impact on economic policy-making.

Rangarajan, who satisfies all three criteria in ample measure, joins an august group of other awardees in the past which included Manmohan Singh, former finance minister,Raja Chelliah, chairman of the governing board of the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, and economists PR Brahmananda, ML Dantwala, Bhabatosh Datta and KN Raj.

An academician and policy-maker par excellence, Rangarajan graduated from Madras University with BA (Hons) and then proceeded to the University of Pennsylvania from where he obtained his PhD. He taught for some time at the University's Wharton School of Finance and Commerce and the Graduate School of Business Administration at New York University. In India, he has taught students at Loyola College, Madras, the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi, and the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

Rangarajan's biggest contribution is, however, in the area of policy-making, where he has held various positions, both official and otherwise. As Governor of the RBI from 1992 to 1997, Rangarajan presided over an era of fairly revolutionary changes in the Indian financial system. During hisstewardship, interest rates were deregulated, the forex markets freed from most of the earlier restraints, and the banking system was strengthened through the imposition of tighter provisioning norms and the adoption of more transparent practices.

Between 1985 and 1991, he was a member of the economic advisory council of the prime minister. He was president of the Indian Economic Association in 1988 and president of the Indian Econometric Society in 1994. As a member of the Planning Commission, Rangarajan had a critical role to play in the formulation of the Eighth Five-Year Plan. He also served, for a brief period, as a member of the Tenth Finance Commission.

During the five years that he served as RBI governor, Rangarajan made monetary policy into a flexible instrument of economic policy to achieve growth and price stability.

Perhaps his greatest achievement was to get the government to agree to fiscal restraint by signing a MoU on Ways and Means Advances, which provides the central bank with greaterautonomy in the conduct of monetary policy. Rangarajan will be presented the award on December 27, 1998, barely a week ahead of his 67th birthday on January 5.