New Delhi: Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan has come under severe criticism from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the alleged failure of his policies. BJP Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy has sought the outspoken Rajan's removal.
"I feel Raghuram Rajan is not appropriate for the country. The country has suffered because of the way he raised interest rates saying that inflation will be curbed. He should be relieved as soon as possible and sent to Chicago," said Swamy on Thursday.
Before assuming charge as the 23rd Governor of the RBI on September 4, 2013, Rajan was with the University of Chicago Booth School, where he was the Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the Booth School. He is currently on leave from the university.
Rajan has been very straightforward in his approach and words on India's economic situation.
Describing his job of formulating monetary policy in India as a 'joyful' and easy task, Rajan had said complexities arise when ensuring its political acceptance and one needs to be "a little more clever" for that.
"You can't bulldoze your way in some of these situations and therefore you have to be a little more clever. You have to understand where altering a policy from Economics 101 will make very little difference, but be politically more acceptable," he said on Wednesday at the Cambridge University.
Addressing the students on Wednesday evening as part of his concluding presentation at the two-day Marshall Lecture series 2015-16, Rajan said policy formulation in an emerging market like India is a fairly basic economics task as such.
"A lot of policy formulation is Economics 101. Just like in industrial countries, there is a lot of stuff, which does not require deep insights of economics. To my mind, deeper insights come when you are trying to make it politically feasible," the former International Monetary Fund (IMF) Chief Economist said.
Asked how easy he found his job of economic policy formulation in India, he joked: "Formulation is very easy. I think it is harder to implement the policy."
On a more serious note, he added: "The joy of trying to formulate policy in a developing country is that there are many more places where good policy can have significant effects. In that sense, there are lots of low hanging fruits and often no real impediment to plucking them."
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