Duvvuri Subbarao

Duvvuri Subbarao is the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (2008-2013), the twenty second person to head the central bank. On 8 August 2011, his term was extended by two years to maintain continuity in monetary policy matters as India grapples with a trade-off between inflation reduction and economic growth.[caption id="attachment_57555" align="alignleft" width="380" caption="Pal Pillai/AFP Photo"][/caption]A 1972 batch IAS officer of the Andhra Pradesh cadre, a physics graduate from IIT, and a doctorate in Economics, Subbarao was appointed governor for a three-year term at a time when the global financial recession had just begun to spread to India. Listing him among India's 50 most powerful people, Businessweek magazine wrote:

He inherited the job just as the financial crisis spread to India, but he also inherited a relatively tame Indian financial industry to oversee. Since then, he has encouraged the practices that kept Indian banks mostly immune from the credit crunch, disapproving of strong leveraging and complex derivatives. He has also overseen the three fiscal stimulus packages the Indian government announced.

Soft-spoken, he is known for springing surprises when setting monetary policy. His hawkish comments have been accompanied by a series of monetary policy tightening measures in 2011, despite the government's pro-growth stance.A career bureaucrat and finance ministry veteran, Subbarao served in the prime minister's economic advisory council in the Congress party government's previous term. Before that he was a World Bank economist. Under his leadership, the RBI doubled the frequency of monetary policy reviews from quarterly to eight times a year in a move to decrease the need for off-cycle rate moves, of which there have been two in 2011.He was a senior official in the finance ministry when Manmohan Singh, now the prime minister, began reforming the economy in the early 1990s as finance minister.With inputs from Reuters