India’s central bank governor Raghuram Rajan, who has faced criticism from members of the ruling party for keeping interest rates too high, stunned officials on Saturday by announcing he would step down when his term ends on Sept. 4.
Rajan, who is on leave from the University of Chicago, was appointed as the governor of the Reserve Bank of India by the previous Congress government, where he had served as chief economic advisor to the finance minister for about a year before taking the helm of the central bank, Reuters reported.
A former chief economist at the IMF, Rajan has been popular with foreign investors for his efforts to tackle inflation, and won praise for helping rescue India from its worst currency crisis in more than two decades after taking the helm in September 2013. In a nearly 900-world letter to staff he said he planned to return to academia.
