The Centre on Tuesday announced the appointment of three external members to the monetary policy committee (MPC) of the Reserve Bank of India.

The new members are Ram Singh, director, Delhi School of Economics; Saugata Bhattacharya, economist; and Nagesh Kumar, director and chief executive, Institute for Studies in Industrial Development (ISID), New Delhi.

They will have a term of four years and replace outgoing members Jayanth Varma, Ashima Goyal and Shashanka Bhide.

With the uncertainty on the appointments over, the MPC will begin its three-day meeting on October 7.

Saugata Bhattacharya was previously the chief economist and executive vice-president at Axis Bank.

Prior to Axis Bank he was at IDFC, where he worked as a specialist with the policy advisory group and participated in several key committees of Government of India, including the Prime Minister’s Task Force on Infrastructure. He is now with the Centre for Policy Research.

According to its website, Bhattacharya has been playing a lead role in the ongoing work with the Government of Andhra Pradesh, supporting its data analytics unit.

Bhattacharya favours interest rate cuts to push growth. His writings indicate he has a dovish outlook.

“The biggest challenge in MPC’s monetary policy response is a calculated risk that early interest rates cuts, to boost India’s growth amidst global uncertainty, might potentially re-ignite inflation. Given the likely future growth–inflation tradeoffs, this maybe a risk worth taking,” he said in a media article in August.

Nagesh Kumar joined the ISID in May 2021. Bedore the ISID, he was the director at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission of Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), holding several senior management roles during 2009-21.

These included that as an chief economist, director of macroeconomic policy and financing for development division at the UNESCAP headquarters in Bangkok. He is also a non-resident senior fellow of the Boston University Global Development Policy Center.