The Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India (CEA or Chief Economic Advisor of India) advises the government on economic matters and is responsible for the preparation of the Economic survey of India tabled in Parliament before the Union budget of India is presented.

The CEA holds the rank of a Secretary to the Government of India. The CEA is the ex-officio cadre-controlling authority of the Indian Economic Service. The CEA is head of Economic Division of the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Government of India. Until 2009, the CEA’s position was a Union Public Service Commission appointment and until the 1970s almost all CEAs were members of the Indian Economic Service.

One CEA, Manmohan Singh went on to become the Prime Minister of India. Four CEAs have gone on to become the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India - I. G. Patel, Manmohan Singh, Bimal Jalan and Raghuram Rajan, and one (Rakesh Mohan) became the Deputy Governor of the RBI.

History Until 2009, the post of Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India was a Union Public Service Commission appointment and until the 1970s almost all CEAs were members of the Indian Economic Service.

Role The extent to which the Government takes into account the advice of the Chief Economic Adviser has generally been considered to be open-ended.

In his 2018 book titled Of Counsel: The Challenges of the Modi-Jaitley Economy, former CEA Arvind Subramanian stated that the job of the CEA carried no executive responsibility. According to him, the only clearly defined job of the CEA was to produce the Economic Survey of India preceding the Union Budget.

List of CEAs Below is a list of Chief Economic Advisers that have been appointed by the Government of India since Independence in 1947.

S.No Name Portrait Assumed office Left office Prime Minister 1 JJ Anjaria 1956 1961Jawaharlal Nehru 2 IG Patel 1961 1964 1964 1966 Lal Bahadur Shastri 1966 1967Indira Gandhi 3 V. K. Ramaswamy 1967 1969 4 Ashok Mitra 1970 1972 5 Manmohan Singh 1972 19766 R. M. Honavar 1977 1979 Morarji Desai Charan Singh7Bimal Jalan 1981 1984 Indira Gandhi 1984 1988Rajiv Gandhi8Nitin Desai 1988 1988 1988 1989V. P. Singh 9Deepak Nayyar 1989 1990 1990 1991 Chandra Shekhar 1991 1991P. V. Narasimha Rao10Shankar Acharya 1993 1996 1996 1997 H. D. Deve Gowda 1997 1998 Inder Kumar Gujral 1998 2001Atal Bihari Vajpayee 11 Rakesh Mohan 2001 200212Ashok K Lahiri 2002 2004 2004 2007Manmohan Singh 13 Arvind Virmani 2007 2009 14 Kaushik Basu 2009 2012 15 Raghuram Rajan 10 August 2012 4 September 2013 16 Arvind Subramanian 16 October 2014 20 June 2018Narendra Modi17 Krishnamurthy Subramanian 7 December 2018 7 December 2021 18 V Anantha Nageswaran 28 January 2022 Incumbent

See also List of office-holders in India Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India

References

External links Official website