It is a matter of great pride that IIM Raipur was declared the joint winner of the very first edition of RBI Policy Challenge among 260 participating teams around the country. The RBI Policy Challenge is a national level competition launched by the Reserve Bank of India this year. The competition had three rounds (Reginal, Zonal, and National). The National Round was held in RBI Central Office,Mumbai on 5th April, 2016.
In the National Round, the panel of eminent jury consisted of Dr. Raghuram G. Rajan, Governor,Reserve Bank of India (Head of the Jury); Dr Urjit R. Patel, Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India;Shri S S Mundra, Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India; Professor Errol D’ Souza, Faculty, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad; Professor Ashima Goyal, Faculty, Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research, Mumbai; Dr. Sajjid Z. Chinoy, Chief India Economist and Executive Director, JP Morgan, and Dr. Pranjul Bhandari, Chief India Economist, HSBC.
A monetary policy related topic involving hypothetical scenarios was assigned in the forenoon and the teams were required to make a presentation in the afternoon with clear policy recommendations. It was only IIM Raipur which recommended for a 50 basis point increase in repo rate in their presentation. The team gave justification for this using some advanced regression technique. Their presentation was appreciated for its rigour (due to the application of Taylor rules,IS-LM model, and advanced econometric techniques).
The presentation was followed by a Q&A round which added cherries to the cream. A number of questions were raised by the eminent personalities in the audience for which they got satisfactory responses from the team. The team showed due intelligence while answering the questions which was highly appreciated by all.
The winning team comprised of Ajay Singla, Pushp Mitra,Vivek Yadav and Kewal Krishna, who are the students of the PGP 2015-17 batch. The team was awarded a trophy and a cheque of INR 1 lakh.
Additionally RBI has offered the team members an internship up to a period of 3 months at its corporate office in Mumbai in any division of their choice. IIM Raipur envisages to add other badges of excellence in future too.