Haseeb Drabu

Haseeb Ahmed Drabu is a Kashmiri economist and the finance minister of Jammu and Kashmir. He was chairman and CEO of Jammu & Kashmir Bank from 2005 to 2010.

Drabu received a M.Phil in Economics from Centre for Development Studies (Trivandrum), Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Drabu started his career with the Government of India in 1990, first with the Perspective Planning Division of the Planning Commission of India, then as a consultant to the Economic Advisory Council of the Prime Minister and finally with the Tenth Finance Commission. He then joined the media and became an editor at Business Standard, where he set up a research bureau. Subsequently, he served as a consultant to the Asian Development Bank. Haseeb is married to Roohi Nazki, a former Tata executive who later returned to Srinagar to start a tea-house.

After the 2002 state elections, a PDP-led coalition state government (in alliance with the Indian National Congress) came to power in Jammu and Kashmir and appointed Drabu as its economic advisor in January 2003. He planned tax reforms, methods of expenditure compression and attempted to reduce the debt stock of the state government. He was simultaneously appointed as chairman and CEO of Jammu & Kashmir Bank by the PDP-Congress govt in 2005.

In the 2008 state elections, the PDP was defeated and the Jammu & Kashmir National Conference came to power and formed the new coalition govt. Although the Congress was again a part of this new coalition govt (becoming the junior partner of NC in 2008, as opposed to of the PDP in 2002), Drabu, a long-time loyalist of PDP supremo Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, was forced to resign from his position in J&K Bank by the new chief minister Omar Abdullah.

In 2014, he formally joined PDP and contested the state elections on the party ticket from his home constituency Rajpora, winning it with a big margin.