Former RBI guv Urjit Patel appointed Beijing-based AIIB vice-president
Urjit Patel will take over from DJ Pandian, a former Gujarat chief secretary who has been AIIB’s vice-president and chief investment officer since 2016, the year the bank was set up with India as its second largest shareholder after China.
Former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Urjit Patel has been appointed as the vice-president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a multilateral development bank based in Beijing.
He will take over from DJ Pandian, a former Gujarat chief secretary who has been AIIB’s vice-president and chief investment officer since 2016, the year the bank was set up with India as its second largest shareholder after China.
Patel is currently the chairperson of the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, a research centre affiliated to the finance ministry.
The Nairobi-born Urjit Patel is said to have quit his job as RBI governor in 2018 following differences with the NDA government over fiscal policies.
The noted Indian economist will take over as vice-president at a time when AIIB is expanding its footprint in developing countries especially India.
Currently headed by China’s Jin Liqun, AIIB currently has five vice-presidents.
India is AIIB’s largest borrower since it was set up six years ago.
“India’s AIIB’s top investment market with 28 projects valued at $6.71 billion,” outgoing Pandian said in an interaction with the media late last year.
Indonesia, Turkey, Bangladesh and China are the next four borrowers from the bank with over $7 billion investment.
Pandian said AIIB has funded projects across sectors in India especially in transport and energy sectors.
The AIIB and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila are processing a $2 billion loan request from India to purchase 667 million Covid-19 jabs to vaccinate at least 317 million people in 19 states across the country.
In December, AIIB approved the $150 million “Chennai City Partnership: Sustainable Urban Service Program” aiming “…to strengthen institutions and improve the quality and financial sustainability of selected urban services in Chennai”.
“In this case, we are helping India to increase their resilience and meet their objectives even during the most difficult times. We envision this project as a first-phase engagement and a building block for AIIB’s long-term partnership with India and - in this particular case, Chennai - by supporting the government’s programme of expenditures,” Pandian was quoted in an AIIB statement released after the project was approved.
The former Indian bureaucrat has in the past sought to dispel the impression, especially in India, that the AIIB is a Chinese bank, saying it has emerged as a multilateral bank becoming the lead financier of infrastructure projects in Asia.
Except the US and Japan, most of the developed and developing countries have joined the bank.
An AIIB report in December said that India can capitalise on a higher participation rate in global value chains (GVC) to accelerate the country’s recovery from the pandemic. “AIIB’s 2021 Asian Infrastructure Finance Report said GVC participation across India will largely rely on a combination of improving infrastructure, strengthening institutional quality and increasing port efficiency, capacity and connectivity with the hinterland,” it said.
In late December, the AIIB approved the application of Iraq to join, becoming the bank’s 51st regional member to bring its membership to 105.
As of October 22, AIIB has overall approved 147 projects in 31 countries valued at $28.97 billion.