Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das has been named as “Governor of the Year.”
He was decorated with the “Governor of the Year” award at the Central Banking Awards 2023. The publication Central Banking is a London-based international economic research journal, the media reported on Wednesday.
After Raghuram Rajan (2015), he is the second RBI Governor to receive the award.
Das “cemented critical reforms, overseen world-leading payments innovation, and steered India through difficult times with a steady hand and well-crafted turn of phrase”, the organizers said.
His tenure, which began in 2018, “has been marked by a series of grave challenges, starting with the collapse of a major non-banking firm, moving through the first and second waves of the coronavirus pandemic, and then, in 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its inflationary impact.”
The leading non-banking firm the organizers referred to was Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS) whose collapse in September 2018 led to a prolonged liquidity crunch in the Indian banking system.
“A handful of other firms collapsed in the subsequent months, including Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative Bank, which had lent heavily to an infrastructure finance firm that went bust.”
The organizers credited Das for “appearing as a voice of calm amid the fear” during the Covid-19 pandemic and cited his opposition to crypto assets in India.
Das, the 25th Governor of RBI, is a retired Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre. He has worked for both Tamil Nadu and the central governments in different capacities.