Government's Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian gets one year extension

NEW DELHI:

Chief Economic Adviser

Arvind Subramanian, whose three year tenure was coming to an end, has been given a one year extension, the

Ministry of Finance

said on Saturday.

"CEA Dr Arvind Subramanian will continue for one more year after completion of his 3 year tenure on 16th October, 2017," the official Twitter handle of the finance ministry said in a post.

With the announcement, the government put to rest speculations that Subramanian had been considering resigning from the post of CEA before the end of his term on October 16 this year.

The post of the CEA, like that of RBI governor, lasts for a fixed tenure of three years. Subramanian has been the main go-to person for advice for finance minister Arun Jaitley on macro-economic matters and has been the driving force behind several policy changes and sweeping economic measures.

Subramanian had assumed the office of India's CEA in October 2014 after Raghuram Rajan vacated it in 2013 to take over as RBI governor. He has been quite vocal in his stand on RBI's monetary policy and spoken openly about the need for a rate cut.

A Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Subramanian graduated from St Stephen's College, Delhi, and got an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He obtained M Phil and D Phil from the University of Oxford, UK.

As CEA, Subramanian has authored the government's annual Economic Survey reports and also came up with solutions to tame India's whopping bad loans worth Rs 6 lakh crore. It was Subramanian who had coined the acronym JAM - which stands for Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile - to encourage technology-enabled, instantaneous monetary transactions.