New Delhi, May 11 (PTI): India has nominated eminent banker K.V. Kamath as head of the New Development Bank being set up by the members of the so-called BRICS grouping.
Finance Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi said Kamath would have a five-year term as president of the $50 billion outfit, which is likely to be operational within one year.
Kamath, 67, is also chairman of ICICI Bank, India’s largest private sector bank.
Leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) had reached an agreement last July to establish the New Development Bank to act as a counterpoint to the Western dominated global financial system.
India got the right to nominate the first president of the bank, to be headquartered in Shanghai, China.
The economies of the BRICS member nations add up to nearly $16 trillion, and the countries account for 40 per cent of the world's population.
After serving at ICICI for more than a decade, Kamath had moved to Asian Development Bank, Manila, in the private sector department in 1988.
His principal work experience at ADB was in various projects in China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and other emerging nations.
Last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had pitched for speeding up the creation of the BRICS bank, and said India hopes to ratify the agreement over the financial institution by 2014-end, and that 2016 should be set as the target for its inauguration.
Modi had made this remark at an informal meeting with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and South African President President Jacob Zuma on the sidelines of a summit of the Group of 20 nations at Brisbane, Australia, in November.
“The appointment will be effective when he becomes free from his current assignment. I think he is on some boards. It may take a couple of days,” Mehrishi said.
“There is no final decision on his tenure. But it is likely to be five years. We got ratification from President of India,” he said, adding it has to be ratified by all the member nation.
India is hoping to get more funds for infrastructure development from BRICS bank, he said.
The decision to set up this multilateral funding agency was taken in Fortaleza, Brazil, at a July 2014 BRICS Summit attended by Modi.
The BRICS development bank, an idea conceived in Delhi in 2012 and approved in Durban in 2013, will have an initial corpus of $50 billion, with scope for expansion up to $100 billion when new members are added.
India has said all five members should contribute equally to the initial capital, as it does not want the new bank to fall into the ownership pattern of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, with a distorted shareholding.
