Logo

Dr. A. Vasudevan, currently Honorary Advisor in the Reserve Bank of India, was Executive Director of the Reserve Bank between May 1996 and end-August 2000. As the Executive Director, he was in-charge of research, statistics, monetary policy and information technology departments. He has had vast international experience — Advisor to Executive Director for India at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) between 1984 and 1989; Member of the Indian Delegations to semi-annual IMF/ World Bank and G-24 meetings between 1984 and 1989 and again between 1993 and 2000; represented India at the UNDP Conference on financing of sustainable development at Santiago, Chile; Central Bank Deputy at the Group of Two Deputies’ meetings; and Member of the Task Force on Implementation of Standards and the Follow-up Group on the Implementation of Standards, appointed by the Financial Stability Forum. Among the several Committees on which he served, the important ones were: Expert Group on Saving and Capital Formation in India, Government of India, 1996 (Member), the Working Group on Money Supply, Reserve Bank, 1998 (Vice-Chairman), and the Committee on Technology Upgradation in Banking Sector, Reserve Bank of India, 1999 (Chairman). Apart from the present volume (edited by him), Dr. Vasudevan has recently authored Central Banking for Emerging Market Economies (Academic Foundation, 2003). Described as a “path-breaking work” of “encyclopaedic proportions”, within a short time-span this publication received extraordinary praise in several reviews across leading newspapers and journals. Having authored/edited a few other books earlier, Dr. Vasudevan has numerous scholarly writings of his own in various professional journals, both Indian and foreign. He also taught M.A. students at the University of Bombay (1966-69) on the theories of money and economic development and central banking. Currently Dr. Vasudevan is engaged in writing the history of Reserve Bank of India — a task he has been entrusted with by a committee of the central bank, chaired by Dr. C. Rangarajan.

Partha Ray is currently Adviser to the Executive Director (India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Bhutan) at the International Monetary Fund, Washington D.C. for more than a decade he, as an economist at the department of Economic Analysis and Policy, reserves Bank of India, has been involved with applied economic research with policy content. He also has been associated with a number of official committees on policy matters. Educated in Kolkata, Mumbai and Oxford, he has published extensively on issues related to baking and monetary policy in professional journals in India and abroad. He taught economics to undergraduate students in RBC College, university of Kolkata during 1987-89.