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Journalism of Courage
While competence is a minimum requirement for any job, continuity is a virtue in jobs where experience is a vital necessity. Rarely today does the government, at the Central and state level, give much attention to either of these factors in senior appointments. Political patronage plays a larger role and, of late, heads of regulatory institutions seem to come only from the pool of retired civil servants who have served their political masters well. Mercifully, there have been some outstanding exceptions to that rule as the recent appointment of Yaga Venugopal Reddy as the governor of the Reserve Bank of India RBI for a period of five years indicates.
Not only is Reddy widely regarded as the most competent person available for the job, there will also be continuity in central bank leadership. While his career has been in the IAS, he has earned an enviable reputation for competence in macro-economic management. He earned his spurs in external economic management in the Union finance ministry but came into his own handling the 1990-91 economic crisis as a backroom boy in North Block. It was this record that prompted the then RBI governor, C. Rangarajan, to invite Reddy to join the RBI as deputy governor.
