On 9 August 2009, Kaushik Basu - then chairman of the Economics Department at Cornell University - got an unexpected phone call from Vini Mahajan, a joint secretary in the office of the Prime Minister of India. Quickly coming to the point, she informed Basu that Dr Manmohan Singh wanted him to become the chief economic adviser to the Government of India, a position that the prime minister himself had once served. As the professor was leaving for the USA the following evening, a meeting was hastily arranged at 7 Race Course Road the following afternoon while Basu was on way to the airport.
The conversations Kaushik Basu had with PM Manmohan Singh the following day changed the course of his career over the following seven years, first as India's CEA and after three years, as World Bank's Chief Economist. The day he began his new job in his grand office in the North Block, he began keeping a diary because he had decided beforehand to write a book on his experience as a policymaker. This book is a modified version of the author's diary entries.
Basu's impressions of his Delhi years ( 2009-2012) are as evocative as it can get. The stint as CEA was marked with high inflation and its management, growth challenges, exchange rate fluctuations as well as some remarkable growth recovery (with India moving past China's GDP growth rate) and designing a pioneering food distribution system. There were corruption scandals too during the period causing widespread street protests. Basu narrates these momentous events most candidly and in a manner making them readable by anyone, including someone like me having no background in economics.
The author gives the reader a ringside view of Indian bureaucracy with all its inventiveness, its archaic and laidback approach to things, and its critical and quirky role in the country's democracy. Basu felt miserable during the initial days of his assignment as CEA, especially after going through the ubiquitous government files which travel from desk to desk gathering no-objection signatures, before anything is approved. He finds this vertical system of permissionism as detrimental to quick and timely decision-making.
Basu muses:"When I felt miserable I had to tell myself that if Malinowski could spend months on among the Trobriand Islanders, surely I can take life in the North Block among politicians and bureaucrats for two years. I must treat this as my anthropological excursion, like that of Levi Strauss or Malinowski; or a scientific exploration to the tropics to collect flora and fauna, such as by Darwin."
Interestingly, the more he interacted with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh alongside other politicians and the top bureaucrats, the more convinced Basu became of the commitment, personal integrity and statesmanship of the man who had personally chosen him as the government's chief economic troubleshooter. The book carries many heartwarming anecdotes with the author's interactions with the prime minister.
The diary entries of the author's World Bank years range from interacting with tiny countries like Bhutan and Samoa to gigantic nations like China and the newly independent nation states of eastern Europe. Basu is a traveller by heart and his reminiscences of places as idyllic and pristine as Cusco in Peru, or of the barren Mayanmar capital city of Nay Pyi Taw make the book a beautiful travelogue too.
It's indeed the most compelling and enjoyable book of policymaking to come out of India in years. The reader is sure to be glued to the book till the end, as I was during the last few days....
(The reviewer Ajay Kumar Singh is a Joint Secretary rank Officer in the Government of Jharkhand.)