Dr. Rajiv Kumar is the Chairman of Pahle India Foundation, a non-profit making research think tank. He is the former Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog. He is currently Member Global Leadership Council, GASP, New York. He is also a Director on Parley India Foundation. He also serves as the Chancellor of Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune and Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Giri Institute of Development Studies, Lucknow.
He has wide experience of having worked in academia, government, industry as well as in multilateral institutions. He started his academic career in Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) as a Researcher during 1977-1982. He later became the Director & CEO of ICRIER between 2006 and 2011. He was a Professor at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT) and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research(CPR), Delhi.
In the government, he was Economic Advisor with Department of Economic Affairs (DEA), Ministry of Finance (1991-1995) and Senior Consultant at the Bureau of Industrial Costs and Prices(BICP), Ministry of Industry (1989-1991).
His experience in the multilateral financial institutions was with Asian Development Bank(ADB), Manila, where he spent 10 years before returning to India in 2004. He was also the Chief Economist of the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) during 2004-2006 and Secretary General of Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) during 2011-2013. He served on the Central Boards of State Bank of India for two terms and was also on the Central Board of Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
Dr. Kumar has a Ph.D in Ecnomics from Lucknow University and a D.Phil from Oxford University.
