Webinar Link

Meeting No: 2516 463 2015
Password: money

Certificate of Participants

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Abstract

November and December 2023 mark the first anniversary of the Reserve Bank of India’s pilot launch of the Digital Rupee. Designed as a central bank digital currency (CBDC), the digital rupee ushers in a new era in the history of money. The point of departure of CBDCs is that money can now be programmed with far reaching implications for the economy and society.

At our webinar, Reimagining Money: Ideas and Evidence, author and former central banker Bazil Shaikh provides a broad-brush history of how money has evolved in India through the millennia: its evolution through metallic coins, token paper money, fiat money (which derives its value from government authority) to CBDCs.

About the Speakers

Ashima Goyal

Ashima Goyal is Advisor at EGROW Foundation. She has provided consultancy to ADB, DEA, GDN, UNDP, RBI, UN ESCAP and WB. She is active in the Indian policy debate; and has served on several government committees, including the Economic Advisory Council Prime Minister and the RBI technical advisory committee for monetary policy, and boards of educational and of financial institutions. She is former Member of RBI's Monetary Policy Committee, an independent director at Edelweiss Financial Services and SBI General Insurance.

She edits a Routledge journal in macroeconomics and finance and contributes a monthly column to the Hindu Business Line. She was a visiting fellow at the Economic Growth Centre, Yale University, USA, and a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow at Claremont Graduate University, USA. Her research has received national and international awards. She won two best research awards at GDN meetings at Tokyo (2000) and Rio de Janeiro (2001), was selected as one of the four most powerful women in economics, a thought leader, by Business Today (2008); was the first Professor P.R. Brahmananda Memorial Research Grant Awardee for a study on History of Monetary Policy in India since Independence (2011), which was published by Springer in 2014; received the SKOCH Challenger Award for Economic Policy (2017); Hindu College OSA Distinguished Alumni Award and 20th FLO FICCI GR8 Beti Award for Excellence in Economics (2018).

Ashima Goyal is widely published in institutional and open economy macroeconomics, international finance and governance, with more than a hundred articles in national and international journals. She has also authored and edited a number of books including Macroeconomics and Markets in Developing and Emerging Economies (Routledge: UK. 2017) and A Concise Handbook of the Indian Economy in the 21st Century (OUP: India, 2019).

Bazil Shaikh

Bazil Shaikh, Ph.D. is an author and former central banker. He served for over 30 years with the Reserve Bank of India in different capacities. He also served as Regional Director for Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand as well as Secretary to the RBI Board. His work areas spanned trade, exchange rate management, forex reserves management, precious metals, rural development, governance and human resource management, amongst others.

He headed the team which conceived, researched and curated the RBI Monetary Museum, Mumbai. He served as Member of the Secretarial Standards Board of the Institute of Company Secretaries of India and on several Committees of Government of India, RBI, Nabard, as well as the National Archives. He read Economics at the Gokhale Institute of Politics, Pune and Public Policy at Princeton University, Princeton, USA. His doctoral thesis was on The Evolution of Modern Banking in India. He has authored several websites and publications, notably, The Paper and the Promise (2000), Mint Road Milestones: RBI at 75 (2010) and The Conjuror's Trick: An Interpretive History of Paper Money in India (2020).