Rakesh Mohan is President and Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), an independent Indian public policy think tank. Mohan and was a former Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, former Secretary, Economic Affairs and former Executive Director on the Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Prior to this appointment, he was a Senior Fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and Professor in the Practice of International Economics in the School of Management, Yale University, and Distinguished Fellow at Brookings India. He has also been a Distinguished Consulting Professor at Stanford University (2009).
He is one of India’s senior-most economic policymakers and an expert on central banking, monetary policy, infrastructure and urban affairs. He was Executive Director at the IMF in Washington, D.C., representing India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Bhutan, and also Chairman of National Transport Development Policy Committee, Government of India, in the rank of a Minister of State. He is a Senior Advisor to the McKinsey Global Institute.
Mohan was Secretary of the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Government of India, in 2004–05 and was the Chief Economic Advisor, Ministry of Finance, Government of India, in 2001–02.
He has been a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister; member of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; member of the National Security Advisory Board; member of the Tariff Authority of Major Ports and member of SEBI. He chaired the Expert Group on Railways (1999–2001); Expert Group on Commercialisation of Infrastructure Projects (1994–96); the Expert Group on Petrochemicals (1992–93) and the Advisory Committee on National Accounts (1997–2000).
He holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Imperial College, University of London, a BA from Yale University and a PhD in Economics from Princeton University. Mohan has written extensively on urban economics, urban development, Indian economic policy reforms, monetary policy and central banking. He has authored three books on urban economics and urban development and two books on monetary policy. His most recent edited book is “India Transformed: 25 Years of Economic Reforms” (Penguin Random House, 2017; Brookings Press 2018).