Noted economist Rajiv Kumar is all set to be appointed as the new Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog, ANI reported. Kumar will succeed Arvind Panagariya, who recently resigned from his post. Arvind Panagariya had said that he will leave the government think tank on August 31 and return to Columbia University. Prime Minister Narendra Modi heads the government think-tank NITI Aayog. Kumar is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and holds a DPhil in economics from Oxford and a PhD from Lucknow University. Between 2006 and 2008, he was a member of the National Security Advisory Board. Earlier, Kumar was Secretary General of the FICCI and had also served as Director and Chief Executive of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), as per PTI. Kumar also served as the Chief Economist at Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) and held senior positions in the the Asian Development Bank, the Indian Ministry of Industries, and the Ministry of Finance. Kumar is also a member of boards of several international and national institutions, including the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center in Riyadh, the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and Asia in Jakarta, the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade and the State Bank of India.
Panagariya, who joined as the first Vice Chairman of Niti Aayog in January 2015, is the second high profile academic-economist after former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan to quit a top job in India to return to the teaching profession in the US. The 64-year old Panagariya, professor of Indian Political Economy at Columbia University, did not have a fixed term at the government think tank, a PTI report said. The government also appointed Dr Vinod Paul, a pediatrician at the AIIMS, as a NITI Aayog member, an official spokesman said to PTI.