Influencing policy, gauging the trajectory in ‘Work, Wisdom, Legacy: 31 Essays from India’

This is an important and somewhat unusual book. It is a compilation of autobiographical narratives of 31 influential individuals, of their professional lives, challenges and encounters. The list includes people drawn from fields as diverse as bureaucracy, corporate sector, media, public policy, politics and academia. There are, however, a few things common to them. All the people included in the list have been in a position to influence policymaking. They excelled in their chosen fields. Nearly all of them are senior citizens in their 70s or 80s, narrating their memoirs after a long professional career. Each one went to a reputed educational institution (Delhi School of Economics, IIM, AIIMS, IRMA, among others). In each case, there was a mentor and a guide.

Given such commonalities, one might expect a monotony or repetitiveness to their accounts. Far from it. There is great diversity in the way they have reflected on their careers. Most have articulated their experiences, encounters at workplaces and their assessment of the world around them. Many contributors started from one profession and shifted to another. Arun Shourie, P Chidambaram and Yashwant Sinha started their careers as a journalist, lawyer and bureaucrat, respectively, and they all shifted to politics and governance. Their accounts bring in a comparative dimension between different vocations. For instance, Sinha found bureaucracy to be far too structured to allow for flexibility and creativity. Politics, on the other hand, was much too disorganised and unpredictable. It did not allow for the comfort of stability. Interesting observation, this!

In almost all the accounts, there is an embedded notion of the nature of the world in which they lived and made their career choices. It is an imperfect world, with a great mismatch between intentions and consequences, plans and their implementation, schemes and their operationalisation. Good intentions were seldom translated into desired results. It is also a Darwinian world which does not seem to contain enough for everybody. As a result, one can gain only at the expense of the other. It is also a volatile, chaotic and unpredictable world which does not progress along anticipated lines.

On the whole, writers from the field of business have a positive and optimistic view of the world, anticipating improvements. The bureaucrats have narrated the hurdles in the path of implementation of schemes and their own struggles to make things better. The politicians have portrayed a pessimistic view of the world, an arena of decline and degeneration.

The memoirs are followed by a summary, prepared by the editors. It is an overview of the economic trajectory pursued in Independent India. The summary focuses on the enormity of the task of transforming a large country into a modern industrial economy. The editors do not see the various changes in economic policies (such as the ones that occurred in 1991) as qualitative shifts, but rather as the next stage in economic development. Once the ideals of self-reliance had been accomplished by the 1980s, it was time to move to the next stage of removing controls and liberalising the economy so as to enable India to participate in the world economy.

The book stresses the role of continuity, more than change, in delineating the economic trajectory of Independent India.

An important conclusion drawn is that the dominant perspectives on the Indian economy have been naively obsessed with a capitalism-socialism dichotomy. It is a mistake to look at the economy in such binary terms. The Indian economy has been far too complex to be adequately understood either from a socialist or a capitalist lens. Just as socialism appears rigid, inflexible and authoritarian from a capitalist vantage point, capitalism appears unstable and manipulated from a socialist vantage point. In reality, the market and the state are both crucial components in any modern industrial economy. The modern economy needs both. It may need a minimalist state, but it does need it.

The Indian economy got this proportion right, or very close to being right, in 1991, and this created the openings for the major transformation. What, however, still needs to be done is to empower the citizen and use modern technology to facilitate this empowerment. A large majority of the contributors in the volume were involved in the first major economic transformation in Independent India. Some played an active role, some endorsed and some others were observers-cum-participants-cum-analysts. This perhaps is the axis around which most of the individual stories have been organised.

The volume thus tells the story of Independent India’s most important transformation through the life experiences of its politicians, journalists, bureaucrats, corporate leaders, bankers and policymakers.

— The Delhi-based writer is a former professor of history