India Economic Forum & LITFest 2022

Viral Acharya was deputy governor of Reserve Bank of India from January 2017 to July 2019 and served as a member of the advisory council of the RBI Academy. He was also a member of the academic council of the National Institute of Securities market (NISM) and security and exchange board of India (SEBI). He worked as academic director of the coller institute of private equity at the London Business School from 2001 to 2008. Viral Acharya graduated from Indian Institute of Technology, India and has a PhD from New York University in Finance and Computer Science. Viral Acharya is recipient of the Alexandre Lamfalussy Senior Research Fellowship and Toulouse School of Economics Junior Prize in Monetary Economics and Finance in 2011.

Ashima Goyal is a renowned economist and widely published in more than hundred articles in national and international journals. She was a visiting fellow at the Economic Growth Center, Yale University, USA, and a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow at Claremont Graduate University, USA. She has provided consultancy to ADB, DEA, UNDP, RBI, UN ESCAP and WB. She is active in Indian policy debate and has served on several government committees including the Prime Minister Economic Advisory Council, the RBI technical advisory committee for monetary policy, boards of journals and educational and financial institutions. Currently she is an Emeritus Professor at IGIDR and contributes a monthly column to the Hindu Business Line.

Dr Rupa Rege Nitsure is the Group Chief Economist of L&T Financial Services since March 2015. Prior to Joining the L&T, she worked as a Chief Economist at Bank of Baroda. She has also worked as a Senior Economist with ICICI (Development Finance Institution) and ICICI Bank and her key areas of specialization are Macroeconomics and Financial Intermediation. She has served on various Committees and published several articles in the field of policy-oriented research. She holds a Ph.D. (Macro-Econometric Modeling) from the Gokhale Institute of Politics & Economics, Pune. Rupa Rege Nitsure has served on the critical committees of government of India and Reserve Bank of India. She is a regular commentator on economic and policy issues on print and electronic media.

Tamal Bandyopadhyay is Consulting Editor in Business Editor. An author and an award-winning journalist, is well known for his weekly column, Banker’s Trust, which now appears every Monday in Business Standard. He is also one of the members of the founding team of Mint, a business daily brought out by HT Media Ltd. In his earlier assignment, he was advising Bandhan Bank on its transformation from a microfinance institution to a universal bank.

Sonal Verma is Indian Economist, currently working as chief economist at Nomura. She specializes in the analysis of trends in the Indian economy, and is considered to be one of India’s top economists. Her forecasts are often published in the media, such as her articles in The Economic Times,Bloomberg, and Business Standard. She also served the Indian government in order to design India’s industrial production index. As an Economist, she has previously worked with CRISIL, ICICI Bank and Lehman and Brother. Sonal Verma is a graduate from Delhi School of Economics.

Dr. Rajeswari Sengupta is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) in Mumbai, India. In the past she has held research positions at the Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR) in Chennai, the Reserve Bank of India, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in Washington D.C. She was a member of the research secretariat for the Bankruptcy Law Reforms Committee (BLRC) that recommended the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code for India. Her research focuses on policy-relevant, macro-financial issues of emerging market economies in general and India in particular in the fields of international finance, open economy macroeconomics, monetary policy and financial markets and regulations. She is currently working on several issues pertaining to the Indian economy such as inflation targeting, monetary policy transmission, capital controls and capital flows, GDP measurement issues, financial stress in the corporate and banking sectors, and firm financing. She has published in reputed international journals such as Economic Policy, The Journal of International Money and Finance, The World Economy, Emerging Markets Review, International Review of Economics and Finance, Pacific Economic Review, Open Economies Review as well as the Economic and Political Weekly in India.

Dharmakirti Joshi is the Chief Economist at CRISIL limited. He has spent more than twenty years in economic research and consultancy. He spent 11 years at the National Council of Applied Economic Research before moving on to the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission, New Delhi, and then CRISIL. He often gets invited to pre-monetary policy meetings chaired by the Governor of Indian Central Bank and participates in discussion on macro issues at NITI Aayog. He is a member of the Economic Policy Group of Confederation of Indian Industry and Indian Merchant Chamber. Dharamkirti Joshi holds a Masters’ degree in Economics, has attended a program on Macroeconomic Policy and Management at Harvard University and was a visiting scholar to the Economic Research Unit of University of Pennsylvania.

Ananth Narayan leverages a more than 20 year career in banking and global markets in covering India’s macroeconomy and financial markets. He is currently Associate Professor of Finance at the SP Jain Institute of Management Research in Mumbai. Ananth served as Standard Chartered Bank’s Regional Head of Financial Markets for ASEAN and South Asia, managing foreign currency, interest rates, commodities, derivatives and debt capital markets businesses across 12 countries, after tenures in fixed income and currencies trading at Deutsche Bank and Citibank. Ananth has served as Vice-Chairman of both the Fixed Income Money Market and Dealers Association (FIMMDA) and Foreign Exchange Dealers Association of India (FEDAI) and was part of several RBI working groups and committees over the years.