Chief Economic Advisor K V Subramanian to quit after three-year stint to 'return to academia'

Chief Economic Advisor (CEA) K V Subramanian will be leaving the finance ministry and returning to academia on completion of his three-year term.

The government had appointed Subramanian, an ISB Hyderabad professor, as the CEA in December 2018. He had succeeded Arvind Subramanian, who quit the position close to a year ahead of his extended tenure.

Subramanian's three-year term would have come up for renewal in December but he decided to return to academia.

The government will have to look for a new person for the crucial post at a time when the economy is coming out of the pandemic-induced decline.

Another important task before the new CEA would be to prepare the Economic Survey to be tabled in Parliament on the last working day of January.

In a statement, K V Subramanian thanked the Prime Minister as well as Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman for their support and inspiring leadership.

"I have decided to return back to academia following the completion of my 3-year fulfilling tenure as the Chief Economic Adviser, Government of India," he said.

Considered as one of the youngest CEAs, he said given the passion for research, bringing new ideas and disseminating them through the Economic Survey has been an unadulterated pleasure.

"This process has taught me to carefully pick a team of talented and motivated professionals in a way that Sourav Ganguly exemplified, remaining calm while continually paddling underneath as (M S) Dhoni epitomised, and always putting the nation first in a way that Rahul Dravid demonstrated.

"The way my incredibly committed and capable team of Indian Economic Service officers responded to the responsibility and the freedom entrusted to them -- a sine qua non for a creative team -- has been so wonderful to observe," he said.

Former CEA Arvind Subramanian was the second key economic policy adviser in the Modi government to quit the job mid-way to return to the US. Previously, the then NITI Aayog vice chairman Arvind Panagariya had stepped down in August 2017, nearly two years before his term was to end.

Incidentally, both were handpicked after the BJP government came to power in May 2014 and cited personal reasons for quitting ahead of tenure.

K V Subramanian, 50, obtained his MBA and PhD in financial economics from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, under the advice of Professor Luigi Zingales and Professor Raghuram Rajan, former RBI Governor.

In previous academic roles, Subramanian served on the finance faculty at Goizueta Business School at Emory University in the US.

Before beginning his academic career, Subramanian worked as a consultant with JPMorgan Chase in New York. He also served in a management role in the elite derivatives research group at ICICI Ltd, which at the time was India's top project financing institution.