Economist Rajiv Kumar has been appointed the Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog in place of Arvind Panagariya, said informed sources.

Panagariya, an academician on leave from Columbia University, resigned as the NITI Aayog Vice Chairman on August 1.

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Kumar, a senior fellow at Centre for Policy Research (CPR), is also chancellor of the the Gokhale Institute of Economics and Politics in Pune and the founding director of Pahle India Foundation, a non-profit research organisation that specialises in policy-oriented research and analysis.

Before coming to CPR, he was Secretary General of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci).

He has also served as Director and Chief Executive of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) and chief economist of the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), as well as in positions with the Asian Development Bank and the Indian Ministries of Industries and Finance.

He presently sits on the boards of several international and national institutions, including the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center in Riyadh, the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and Asia in Jakarta, the State Bank of India, and the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade. He was a member of the Indian Government's National Security Advisory Board between 2006 and 2008.

Kumar holds a DPhil in economics from Oxford and a PhD from Lucknow University.

Apart from Kumar, Vinod Paul, a doctor by professsion, has been appointed member of NITI Aayog. Paul is a paediatrician at AIIMS.