She was barely seven years old when her enthusiastic father arranged the vegetables on a table in groups, helping her understand the concept of multiplication. Today, what she brings to the table will impact the world economy. Indian-born Gita Gopinath's appointment to the position of Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund was a source of pride for Indians. The 46-year-old’s journey from a middle-class Mysuru girl to a world-class economist is a saga of hard work, focus and grit, breeding intellectual leadership.
Currently, the John Zwaanstra professor of international studies and economics at Harvard University, Gita Gopinath was born on December 8, 1971, in Calcutta, during the Bangladesh war. While both her parents are from Kerala, she and her elder sister, Anita, picked up many languages as the family lived in Calcutta and Hyderabad before settling down in Mysore.
After school, Gita joined Mahajana PU college in Mysuru and pursued science. Later, although her grades were good enough for engineering and medicine, she decided to do a baccalaureate (Hons) in Economics Gita had a brief time learning the guitar, and participate in a fashion show, But she gave her all to focus on her studies. Gita also liked track and field, but she surprised everyone when she quit the sport to concentrate on studying. One day, she told her dad she didn't wanna go to practice. ‘Sport is a tricky affair. Unless you are number one in India, you are a nobody! But if you come first or second in university, you could be somebody big’, was her reasoning.
Gita chose economics to pursue a career in civil services. At the same time, her mother stumbled upon an article about the best colleges in India and Lady Shri Ram College for Women (LSR), Delhi, had been ranked as the best for economics. She immediately told Gita to apply. She qualified, even after downgrading the science marks by 10 per cent. Once in Delhi, she called her mother to say her transition from science to economics was tough, and that all her classmates had studied economics from leading colleges in the metros. Yet, she topped all three years. By the time she returned home briefly after the second year, she had brought enormous bundles of study materials for the competitive examinations. She told her mother that she wanted to do an MBA as it fetched good money! Next day, she got up at 5 am, and her mother too and she joined her to open the bundles. She told a Gita that she had all the time to prepare for an MBA, but had little time to complete her BA with distinction. And, Gita immediately called a classmate in Bengaluru and gave away the bundle. She topped Delhi University and created quite a flutter by bagging the gold medal as LSR had beaten St Stephen’s for the first time, and by just two marks.
After BA, Gita gave up her IAS dreams as it had “little money”. She joined the Delhi School of Economics popularly know as D-School or DSE. It was here that Gita met her future husband Iqbal Singh Dhaliwal. Iqbal topped the civil services examinations in 1996. A senior IAS officer of Tamil Nadu, he served for five years before quitting his job and moving to the United States. Now the couple has a 15-year-old son, Rohil.
In 2001, Gita joined the University of Washington, Seattle, for a five-year PhD programme as it was fully funded. Gita inherits that spirit to fight the odds. A few months into her PhD, her professor felt that she deserved to study in a top school. He gave Gita letters of recommendation to three schools, including Harvard and Princeton, and said she was one of the best students the university had in 20 years. He also wrote to the university senate to confer her an MA, although she fell short of its requirements by six months.
Gita lives with her family in a mansion in Boston, and she owns a lake house. She rubs shoulders with the who’s who of the world, her appointments are fixed six months in advance, her articles on world economics and her advice to governments are well appreciated. But it is her hard work and focus that defines her. “I have seen her prepare for her lectures and mail them to her students in advance so that they can be ready with questions the next day. Even on the day she got the call from the IMF, she worked all night,” says Gopinath her father in an interview.
On September 14, Gita’s parents went to meet her in Bengaluru as she had been busy travelling to Delhi, Mumbai and Kerala. She was in India for her lectures and to present a paper to the Reserve Bank of India on demonetisation. Around 7.30 pm, she got a call from the managing director of the IMF to tell her that she had been selected to be the next chief economist and adviser. And even after that, she didn’t stop.
Gita Gopinath’s research, which focuses on International Finance and Macroeconomics, has been published in many top economics journals. She has authored numerous research articles on exchange rates, trade and investment, international financial crises, monetary policy, debt, and emerging market crises.
She is the co-editor of the current Handbook of International Economics and was earlier the co-editor of the American Economic Review and managing editor of the Review of Economic Studies. She had also previously served as the co-director of the International Finance and Macroeconomics program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and member of the economic advisory panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. From 2016-18, she was the Economic Adviser to the Chief Minister of Kerala state in India. She also served as a member of the Eminent Persons Advisory Group on G-20 Matters for India’s Ministry of Finance.
Gita Gopinath is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society, and recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Washington. In 2019, Foreign Policy named her one of the Top Global Thinkers, in 2014, she was named one of the top 25 economists under 45 by the IMF and in 2011 she was chosen a Young Global Leader (YGL) by the World Economic Forum. The Indian government awarded her the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, the highest honour conferred on overseas Indians. Before joining the faculty of Harvard University in 2005, she was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
Undoubtedly, Gita has inspired many young budding economists, like me.
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Prerna Mishra
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