The Reserve Bank of India hosted the Second Suresh Tendulkar Memorial Lecture on August 2, 2018 in Mumbai. The lecture was delivered by Professor Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Governor Dr. Urjit R. Patel welcomed the guests and highlighted the significance of the Lecture series, instituted by the Reserve Bank of India in the honour of Professor Suresh Tendulkar in 2013 to recognise his contribution to the economics profession and his association with the Reserve Bank.

Professor Suresh Tendulkar is regarded as among India’s most eminent economists. His seminal work on the measurement and analysis of living standards in the country will remain his enduring legacy to public policy formulation. The defining feature of his life as a professional economist was a deep sensitivity to poverty and a commitment to data-based research to understand it. He served as a member of numerous working groups on the design and conduct of the National Sample Surveys. He was the Chairman of the Governing Council of the National Sample Survey Organisation, the Chairman of the National Accounts Advisory Committee, and the Chairman of the National Statistical Commission. He also became a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council in 2004 and in 2008 he was appointed the Chairman of the Council. Professor Tendulkar was a Director on the Central Board and the Chairman of the eastern region Local Board of the Reserve Bank since 2006 until he breathed his last on June 21, 2011.

An economist of international renown, Prof. Rigobon is the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Applied Economics at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and a member of the Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee. He has a Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1997. He is one of the two founding members of the Billion Prices Project (BPP) and a co-founder of PriceStats. The BPP, considered the most ambitious data collection project at MIT, is an initiative of the MIT Sloan and Harvard Business School. It uses prices collected from hundreds of online retailers around the world on a daily basis to conduct research in macro and international economics and to compute real-time inflation metrics. Drawing on this experience, Professor Rigobon has made significant advances in big data analytics and has developed new analytical tools for policymakers.

Professor Rigobon’s lecture titled “Big Data and Measurement: from Inflation to Discrimination” is available at www.rbi.org.in.

Ajit Prasad
Assistant Adviser

Press Release : 2018-2019/301