Arvind Subramanian quits as chief economic advisor: 'I will miss his dynamism, energy, intellectual ability,' says Arun Jaitley

In a surprise development, the Chief Economic Advisor (CEA) to the Government of India, Arvind Subramanian, has resigned from his post. In a farewell note posted on Facebook (FB), union minister Arun Jaitley reminisced about his association with the Oxford graduate. Subramanian quit owing to family commitments, Jaitley said in his FB post. “Few days ago Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian met me over video conferencing. He informed me that he would like to go back to the United States on account of pressing family commitments,” Jaitley said, adding that Subramanian’s reasons were “personal but extremely important” to him. “He left me with no option but to agree with him.”

The CEA’s three-year term in office, which was to end on 16 October 2017, was extended by one year last September. Subramanian, a former economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), had originally planned to return to his family in the US at the end of three years, reported the Mint. The Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Washington-based Peterson Institute of International Economics was on leave from the institute for public service. He took over as the CEA to the Indian government on 16 October, 2014 succeeding Raghuram Rajan. The post of CEA was lying vacant for over a year after Rajan left the finance ministry to join the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) as governor in September 2013. Subramanian is also the author of two books, India’s Turn: Understanding the Economic Transformation and Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance. That apart, he has co-authored Who Needs to Open the Capital Account? In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine named him as one of the world’s top 100 global thinkers.