The Reserve Bank of India felicitated two of its officers, Dr. G. P. Samanta, Director and Dr. Abhiman Das, Assistant Adviser in the Department of Statistics and Information Management for winning the prestigious Prof. P. C. Mahalanobis award (medal) for the years 2006 and 2008, respectively, for their outstanding contribution to quantitative economics. The felicitation function was attended by Dr. Subir Gokarn, Deputy Governor and Shri Deepak Mohanty, Executive Director.

This award is instituted by the Indian Econometric Society. Earlier Mahalanobis awardees include Prof. Jagdish Bhagwati, Prof. Sukhamoy Chakravarthy, Prof. Amartya Sen, Prof. N.S. Iyengar, Prof. Pranab Bardhan, Prof. V.K. Chetty, Prof. Nanak Kakwani, Prof. Prasanta Pattanaik, Prof. Arunava Sen, Prof. Dr Sugata Marjit, Prof. Arup Mitra and Prof. Bharat Ramaswami.

Dr. G.P. Samanta works as a Director and Member of Faculty at Reserve Bank Staff College, Chennai. Dr. Samanta’s primary research interest includes inflation and monetary policy issues, economic modeling, forecasting (including applied time series analysis, neural networks, etc.), derivatives and risk management, financial risk modeling (credit risk and ratings, Value-at-Risk, etc.), risk-based banking regulation, measurement of economic variables/parameters, etc.

Dr. Abhiman Das, is Assistant Adviser in the Department of Statistics and Information Management of Reserve Bank of India. The research work that has been recognised for this award includes: (a) efficiency and productivity measurement using nonparametric data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier approach, and their applications to banking; (b) applied econometrics in the field of bank performance, regulation and supervision, including scale economies and technical progress; and (d) advanced time series analysis and forecasting of macroeconomic aggregates, statistical model building, price measurement and issues relating to national accounts statistics.

Ajit Prasad
Manager

Press Release : 2010-2011/227