Budget 2021 | Krishnamurthy Subramanian: The man behind the Economic Survey 2021

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is going to present the Union Budget 2021 on February 1. Just before the Budget, the government will present the Economic Survey 2021 on January 29.

Every year, the survey is prepared under the guidance of the Chief Economic Advisor (CEA) to the government and is tabled in both the houses of the Parliament before the Union Budget is presented following a press conference in New Delhi. This year's Economic Survey has been prepared by the economic division of the Department of Economic Affairs, consisting of CEA Krishnamurthy Subramanian and his team.

The document, which has Volume I, Volume II and the statistical appendix, is the flagship document prepared by the advisors for the finance minister, comprising the current trend and a comprehensive report card of the economy in that fiscal year.

Who is Krishnamurthy Subramanian, the brain behind the Economic Survey 2021?

Krishnamurthy Subramanian, currently the Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India, is a leading expert on economic policy, banking and corporate governance.

He did his Ph.D. in financial economics from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and completed it under the supervision of Luigi Zingales and Raghuram Rajan. On top of that, he is also an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur where he studied electrical engineering, as well as the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.

He is currently on leave from the prestigious Indian School of Business, where he is a Professor of Finance. He has previously been an Assistant Professor of Finance at Emory University in Atlanta, US.

He has worked with leading financial firms such as ICICI and J P Morgan Chase, and has previously served on several expert committees including the P J Nayak Committee on the governance of banks for the Reserve Bank of India and the Uday Kotak Corporate Governance Committee of Securities and Exchange Board of India.

He was also the Founding Board Member at Bandhan Bank (2015-2018).

His idea of Thalinomics, what a common person pays for a vegetarian or non-vegetarian thali, has been acclaimed as the Indian Big Mac Index.

The 2019 Economic Survey authored by Subramanian laid out the strategic blueprint for India to become a $5 trillion economy by generating a virtuous cycle where private investment, wage and employment growth as well as consumption feed into each other.

His push for the behavioural economics of Nudge has been acknowledged for its potential to bring behavioural change in India as it combines the rich tapestry of social and cultural norms in India with a deep understanding of human behaviour.