Gujarat BJP leader and former state minister Jay Narayan Vyas Wednesday took a dig at the educational qualifications of the new Reserve Bank governor Shaktikanta Das.
Referring to the MA (History) degree of the RBI chief, Vyas said he hoped that the RBI governor did not make the central bank itself history.
"The New RBI Governor Das's educational qualification is MA (History). Hope and Pray he doesn't make RBI also a History. May God Bless the New Arrival!!" Vyas tweeted.
Vyas, who was health and family welfare minister in Gujarat till 2012, has been sidelined in the party now. He lost the Assembly elections in 2012 and 2017.
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The Prime Minister Narendra Modi led NDA government on Tuesday appointed Shaktikanta Das as the new Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) governor replacing Urjit Patel.
Das, a retired 1980 batch IAS officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre, is a post graduate in history from the Delhi University but had mostly worked in economic and finance departments in the state and the centre during his 37-year-long tenure.
Besides post graduation in history, Das has done an advanced financial management course from Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and another in development banking and institutional credit from Pune's National Institute of Bank Management.
He also got in-service professional training in financial management in Institute Public Enterprises and did a diploma in basic project management from Administrative Staff College of India, according to reports.
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Das has been the target of ridicule in social media over his educational qualifications vis as vis predecessors Patel and Raghuram Rajan who had doctorates in economics.
He stayed on as the reins were taken over by Pranab Mukherjee and was part of budget making for five consecutive years first as a joint secretary and then as an additional secretary. This spanned over tenures of Mukherjee and Chidambaram.
Das was promoted as Secretary, Department of Chemicals and Fertilizers in December 2013 but was brought back to the finance ministry as revenue secretary when the BJP-led government stormed to power in mid-2014.
He first played a part in the Modi government's crackdown on black money and then building a consensus for the impending rollout of the Goods and Services Tax (GST).
Moved to the economic affairs department in September 2015, he was in-charge when the government on November 8, 2016, withdrew from circulation old 500 and 1,000 rupee notes.
From defending the shock announcement to spearheading the remonetisation drive that included the cumbersome process of printing and supplying new 500 and 2,000 rupees notes, his calm composure brought a sense of serenity to an otherwise chaotic situation.
Mild-mannered, Das is known to rarely lose his cool and focus mostly on looking at solutions through consensus rather than shoving a solution down -- qualities that will come handy at the RBI which is having an unprecedented face-off with the finance ministry.
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(With inputs from agencies)
