Duvvuri Subbarao - India
In the last two decades, as it has opened up
to foreign trade and investment, India has transformed from
a relatively self-reliant economy into one of the world’s
fastest-growing large economies. Though India suffered from
the worldwide financial crisis that began in 2008, it should
recover quickly and continue its explosive growth, says Duvvuri
Subbarao, the new governor of the Reserve Bank of India, which
is similar to the U.S. Federal Reserve. “I am optimistic
about India and its growth potential,” he says. “The
entrepreneurial spirit, the improved productivity, the increased
savings—those drivers are all in place.”
During his nearly four decades in India’s
civil service, Subbarao has played an important role in India’s
budding economy. He began his career in the civil service in
1972, after earning a master’s degree in physics from
the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. After spending several
years at junior postings in India’s districts, he left
to study economics in the United States and earned his master’s
from Ohio State University in 1978.
Impressed by the U.S. educational
system and eager to learn more, he became a Humphrey Fellow
at MIT in 1982. “At MIT, I really wanted to study quantitative
economic modeling,” Subbarao says. “But I ended
up doing a lot of other things—a bit of economics, a
bit of system dynamics, and a bit of business school courses.”
Subbarao says the program “was structured
exactly to fit my needs,” including the ability to do
research outside of the United States. While he was a fellow,
Subbarao spent a week at the International Institute of Applied
Systems Analysis, in Austria. There he learned economic theories
that were being put into actual practice. For Subbarao, it
was a “bridge between the real world and academia.”
After returning to India, he used these experiences
abroad as he rose higher in India’s civil service. In
1988, he became joint secretary in the Department of Economic
Affairs in the country’s Ministry of Finance. He was
there during the country’s 1991 economic crisis, when
India’s currency weakened rapidly because the rupee had
been valued higher than what it was worth in international
markets. The crisis was a turning point in India; after 1991
a host of economic reforms opened up the economy. Subbarao
worked on teams that addressed the crisis by a variety of methods,
including loosening the country’s import restrictions.
“The whole model had been that we should
be self-sufficient,” Subbarao says. “After the
reforms it was more free—import what you need and export
what you can. It was an integration of India into the world
economy.”
From 1999 to 2004, Subbarao worked as a senior economist at
the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and was promoted to lead
public policy specialist. There he concentrated on public finance
in Africa and Asia and managed a study on decentralization
across East Asia. After returning to India, he served as secretary
of the prime minister’s economic advisory council and
became India’s finance secretary in 2007. In September
2008, he was nominated to his current position at the Reserve
Bank of India.
Subbarao says that in the years
since his fellowship, Senator and Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s ability
to “make a difference” has stayed with him. The
fellowship “has helped me more than in the narrow sense
of giving me academic inputs,” he says. “It has
helped me become a better individual and a more professional
civil servant.”
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