A podcast with C. Rangarajan, BR Ambedkar the economist, Fellowship deadlines

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My conversation with Dr. C. RangarajanWhen asked why the Indian rupee didn’t end up a tin pot currency, I often credit its stability to Dr. C. Rangarajan, who was deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in 1991, and governor from 1992-97. His work alongside finance minister Dr. Manmohan Singh (‘92-96), and with Mr. P. Chidambaram (‘96-7), in the first few years after the crisis, was instrumental in bringing stability. Typically, countries that face balance of payments and currency crises tend to stabilize briefly through IMF loans (that come with conditionalities), before regressing to their previous state. India had currency problems in the mid fifties. In 1966, India devalued the rupee and failed at implementing any economic reforms, discussed in the 1991 Project at Mercatus and covered in detail in this excellent essay by Prakhar Misra. But India never regressed with balance of payments and currency problems after 1991. The Hundred Rupee note (1996) signed by C Rangarajan as Governor, Reserve Bank of India.I had a chance to have a conversation with him on the Ideas of India podcast and ask him the same question: what did India do differently to ensure it didn’t have currency crises after 1991?RANGARAJAN: This has been the experience of many countries which went to IMF, but the point is that we took reforms very seriously after we went to IMF. It is also proof of the fact that the reforms were not imposed. The reforms were our own making. We had decided that the time has come to move in a different direction, change from what we are doing earlier, and therefore…