Patnaik joins the conglomerate two months after Economist and Political Analyst Ajit Ranade left the position. Ranade has since assumed charge as the Vice-Chancellor of the prestigious Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics.
“Dr Ila Patnaik will join the Aditya Birla Group as Group Chief Economist on 1st April 2022,” an Aditya Birla Group spokesperson confirmed to Moneycontrol.
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Patnaik is a senior fellow and professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), a Delhi-based Finance Ministry think tank. Prior to joining NIPFP, Patnaik had worked at the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), the Indian Council for Research in International Economic Relations (ICRIER), and as Economics Editor at the Indian Express.
She served as the Principal Economic Advisor to the Government from May 2014 to December 2015. She had also been part of several internal working groups in the Finance Ministry and the Reserve Bank of India.
In 2014, she was the only female economist in a list of top 10 economists published by Indian Express as part of its ‘India’s most powerful people’ series, alongside Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, and former Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan.
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She has also co-authored a series of working papers on foreign investment mechanisms, consumption volatility and productivity shocks in emerging markets, and monetary policy transmission, among others, published by the International Monetary Fund.
Patnaik is also a prolific writer. Her book, The Rise of the BJP: The Making of the World’s Largest Political Party was coauthored with Union Labour and Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav, and released in January 2022.
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The Mumbai-based Aditya Birla Group is a multinational conglomerate operating across 26 nations in Europe, South East Asia, North America, and South America. It is present in businesses such as metals, pulp, and fibre, chemicals, textiles, carbon black, telecom, cement, financial services, fashion retail, and renewable energy.
