Manoj Kumar Rawat is a banking and development-finance professional with over three decades of experience across agriculture and rural finance, priority-sector lending, MSME finance, development finance and regulated financial institutions.

 

Beginning his career as a Scientist-Engineer with ISRO, his professional journey has subsequently spanned NABARD, Fullerton India, RBL Bank, ValueFin India and IFAD, combining commercial banking, development finance and rural financial systems.

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​His work has covered P&L leadership, credit and risk, product and distribution, institution building, investment credit, refinance, rural infrastructure, financial inclusion and agricultural value chains, with career-wide exposure to approximately USD 2 billion in portfolios, financing and capital deployment across banking, agriculture, rural infrastructure and development finance.

 

At RBL Bank, he served as Group EVP & Head, Agriculture & Rural Business and a member of the Management Committee, leading a national business spanning agriculture, rural retail, MSME, value-chain and commodity finance, warehousing and priority-sector lending. Earlier, he was part of the founding leadership team for Fullerton India’s rural and microfinance business, with responsibility across risk management, credit frameworks, product policy and portfolio governance.

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He spent more than a decade with NABARD, working across investment credit, refinance, rural infrastructure, agricultural finance, irrigation, water resources, warehousing, cold chain, agricultural marketing, horticulture, post-harvest systems, financial inclusion and development programmes. His work also included NABARD Consultancy Services (NABCONS) and serving as PMU In-Charge for a KfW-assisted Indo-German watershed development programme.

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​He bootstrapped and led ValueFin, an RBI-registered NBFC, as Founder, MD & CEO, with direct responsibility across governance, capital, regulation, credit and operations. More recently, he worked with IFAD as Senior Consultant & Lead Technical Architect on an agri-finance facility in Africa, covering refinancing, guarantees, risk-sharing structures, governance, operating frameworks and implementation architecture.

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His experience extends across smallholder finance, FPOs and producer organisations, cooperatives, SHG/JLG systems, dairy, horticulture, agri-processing, rural enterprises, MSMEs, warehousing, commodity finance and post-harvest infrastructure.

 

He has also undertaken advisory, mentoring, policy and institutional engagements involving financial institutions, government and development organisations, and has worked with or alongside institutions including IFAD, IFC, KfW, GIZ, World Bank, CDC/British International Investment, FAO and USAID.

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He has advised on the Government of India’s National Agriculture Market (e-NAM) initiative, served as a Jury Member of the Global Climate Partnership Fund, and currently serves on the Governing Board of CLEAN Network. He is the Founder & CEO of Rural Rethink Advisory LLP, with current interests spanning agriculture and rural finance, development-finance architecture, climate-aligned finance, carbon markets, institutional systems and Responsible AI for rural financial services.

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An alumnus of G.B. Pant University of Agriculture & Technology, where he was a B.Tech Gold Medallist, he also holds an M.E., MBA (Finance) and CAIIB, and is a Certified Independent Director through IICA. His executive and specialised learning includes programmes through Cornell, Wharton, Oxford Saïd and IIM Ahmedabad, together with professional certification in Artificial Intelligence through IBM.

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His research and publications cover climate finance, carbon markets, smallholder and rural finance, agricultural finance systems, institutional architecture and sustainable development. Open-access publications, working papers, preprints, datasets and methodology outputs are available through OSF, Zenodo, Harvard Dataverse, Figshare, SSRN, ScienceDB, ResearchGate and Academia.edu.

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He is also the author of The Carbon Trilogy — Carbon Credit: A Beginner’s Guide, The Carbon Handshake: The Golden Suture and The Carbon Economy Simplified — a three-book body of work connecting carbon markets, finance, agriculture and the emerging carbon economy. He has also participated as a speaker and guest faculty at IIMs, IITs, banking and management institutions, training programmes, and national and international forums.

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Based in Mumbai, his work continues to sit at the intersection of finance, agriculture, institutions, climate and emerging technologies.