Who is Suman K Bery? Here's everything about the new NITI Aayog Vice-Chairman

After the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog vice-chairman Dr Rajiv Kumar stepped down from his position, Dr Suman K Bery was appointed as the new Vice-Chairman of NITI Aayog on April 22. The new appointment with the NITI Aayog was informed in a press release by the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions.

Who is Suman K Bery?

A non-resident fellow of Bruegel, an economic policy research institution in Belgium's Brussels, Dr Bery will be succeeding Dr Rajiv Kumar who was serving as Vice-Chairman of the government agency since 2017.

Education

Suman K Bery who was educated at The Doon School in Dehradun spent a year at Oakham School in the United Kingdom. He went on to study philosophy, politics, and economics at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, and then got a master's degree in public affairs from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. 

His PhD dissertation at Princeton Unversity was focused on the Reserve Bank of India's monetary policy instruments. He has written about financial sector reforms in India, Latin American banking crises, and the political economy of economic changes in developing countries.

Career

Suman K Bery was a former Director-General of the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) in New Delhi and a member of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Prime Minister's Office of India. NCAER is a New Delhi based non-profit think tank on economics. Berry served as the director-general of NCAER from 2001-11.

Before joining NCAER in 2001, he worked as the Lead Economist for Latin America at the World Bank in Washington DC,  where he oversaw policy analysis and research initiatives in several South American countries including Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. He worked at the World Bank for 28 years i.e. from 1972 to 2000.

Also, Suman Bery worked as a Special Consultant to the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India in Mumbai from 1992 to 1994. He was actively involved in creating recommendations for government debt market reform, linkages between general financial sector deregulation and the development of the bond market, and market structure difficulties while at the Reserve Bank of India, building on the experience of other emerging nations.

Notably, Suman also serves on the Central Board of the State Bank of India and has been a member of the government's several committees as well as task forces.