Surjit S. Bhalla is currently Chairperson of the newly constituted GOI-Mospi committee to estimate Household Income Distribution in India. He was Executive Director for India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Bhutan at the IMF (Nov. 2019-Oct. 2022). He has served as part-time member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Economic Advisory Council, and has served on several government committees, including Chairperson High Level Advisory Group on Trade (2018-19) and member, RBI Capital Account Convertibility Committees, 1999 and 2006.
Surjit has taught at the Delhi School of Economics and served as Executive Director of the Policy Group in New Delhi, the country’s first non-government funded think tank. His first job was as a computer-aided design engineer at Fairchild Semiconductors (1969-70). He has worked as a research economist at the RAND Corporation, the Brookings Institution, and at both the research and treasury departments of the World Bank, and as a consultant to Warburg Pincus. He has also worked on Wall Street in Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs. He was founder-chairman of Oxus Research & Investments 1997-2016; and was Senior India Analyst for the Observatory Group, NY, April 2015-Sept. 2018. He has also been a Contributing Editor for Indian Express (2010-2019).
He is the author of several academic articles in journals (e.g. American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers) , books, and more than 1500 op-eds in national newspapers and magazines.
