First published by Westland Publications Private Limited in 2019
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Copyright T.C.A. Ranganathan and T.C.A. Srinivasa Raghavan, 2019
ISBN: 9789388754767
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
O ne day, over two years ago, my cousin Srinivasa Raghavan and I were having coffee at the India International Centre, New Delhi. The idle talk veered around to economics and the Indian economy. I said that in comparison to every other well-off country, including China, microeconomic fundamentals in India were completely off-track. He asked me to explain. I said, I meant things like scale, size, location, quality norms, treatment of entrepreneurial ambitions etc. The large bulk of the problems India experiences stem from mis-signals emanating from here and not the oft-imagined misdemeanours of the hapless citizenry. He looked askance and so I elaborated. Imagine a cloudburst type of an event over two habitats, one with high quality drainage and other urban infrastructure and the other without. Would both get equally rain-damaged?
I told him how in my former institution, Exim Bank of India, we had built up a strong research team which worked with micro fundamentals available through the likes of UNCTAD trade databases, ASI databases, agricultural yield tables etc. as the principal instruments of study for rendering policy advisory services. He said I should write a book. I refused stating that I wouldnt even know where and how to start. He said, I will give you the topic, and you write the chapters that you are comfortable with. I will do the rest. I still refused and thought the matter would die out.
However, one day, he just blandly announced to other family members how happy he was that I was co-authoring a book with him. Everyone started congratulating me. My wife, Namita, who has written several academic bestsellers and my children, Surabhi who is also an academic author and Jayant, with his command over software accessible information, along with my brothers Raghavan and Anant, each with multiple books to his credit, were all offering to help. So, the story began.
Bankers dont usually write books. Nor did I have any initial ideas on this score. Moreover, the attempt was to present an analysis and plead a cause different from the conventional thought. As a first-time author, I had heard about it, but to actually experience the traumatic stress of a blank page and not knowing what to do with it was altogether a different story. I need to put on record that the book on several occasions, felt like it would prefer to remain stillborn. That it did not but is instead available for critiquing has more to do with the all-round familial support and repeated morale boosters provided than that I can properly express.
The book required a lot of data gathering, data management apart from referencing other research studies etc. This would not been possible without the learnings as also enthusiastic support, I received from Prahalathan Iyer, David Sinate, Ashish Kumar, Mayank Khurana, Viswanath Jandhalya, Rahul Mazumdar, Vanlalruata Fanai, Sumana Sarkar, Sara Joy, Snehal Bangera, Renuka Vijay and other members of the Economic Research team of the Export Import Bank of India, both when I was there and later for this book. I also wish to thank S. Padmavathy, Chief Economist at Indian Overseas Bank for her valuable assistance regarding Indian banking related data.
The use and interpretation of the data as presented in the book was made possible by the learnings received over a period of over four decades from a very large number of my batchmates, colleagues and seniors in State Bank of India, Export Import Bank of India and Indian Overseas Bank and the narrations I had imbibed of their varied experiences and intersections with, and assessments about the Indian systems but also of merchants, entrepreneurs, farmers and officialdom. An exhaustive acknowledgement of all those I learnt from is not possible due to sheer numbers as also lapse of time and yet a book of this type would not have been possible but for the learnings so received. A minimally illustrative list of those I need to thank will necessarily need to include, in the order of their appearance: D.C. Sanghi, V.K. Dutt, N.S. Viswanathan, Sangeet Shukla, B.V.V.R. Rao, Birendra Kumar, S. Sridhar, K. Menon, D. Maheshwari, R. Saxena , V.G. Deshpande, P.K. Vohra, P.R. Suresh, A. Mahajan, C.V. Bijlani, M.N. Majmudar, M.G. Bhide, V. Janakiraman, D.P. Roy, Mohan Subramanium, M.S. Tripathi, D.D. Khetrapal, R. Butalia, C. Singh, A. Tandon, A. Gupta, S. Bhattacharya, K.K. Kumra, Pratip Chaudhary, H. Pattnaik, Manohar Lal, A. Mehra, R. Sarkar, S.K. Sharma, Umesh Sharma, K.K. Narula, R.C. Gupta, H.R. Jat, Rajvir Singh, S. Bafna, P.S. Mehrotra, Ashok Kini, M.K. Subramanium, Madhukar , H. Lal, S. Shahubudin, Prabhurangan, Varna, Amitabh Kumar, R. Sehgal, Gyan Mohan, A.P. Varma, Phani Kiran, Sharat Mishra, R.K. Sharma, O.P. Bhat, Deepak Chawla, T.S. Bhattacharya, C. Bhattacharya, V.K. Gupta, Bharti Rao, Y. Aggarwal, S.K. Chaudhary, N. Vyas, D. Sarkar and others from my SBI days, Indrajit Gupta, U.N. Challu, K. Gopalkrishnan, S. Srivastava, Bhavna, Diya, Vivek, Pooja, Ravi and others from my days in SBI Capital Markets , D. Rasquinha, P. Dalal, Shankar, S. Joseph, M. Sarkar, Ajit Kumar, T.V. Rao, Nadeem, S.P. Singh, Harsha, Meena, Deepali, Tarun , Marisa, Aban, Dilnavaz , A.K. More, M.S. Bajaj and others from my days in Exim Bank as also R.S. Kumar and his team in Indian Overseas Bank. I was also privileged to discuss policy-related issues with a large number of ministers and state officials and journalists as also with officials of our embassies and consulates not only in India and China, where it was intense but also a very large number of countries in Africa and emerging Asia and in the UN, World Bank, ADB and AfDB offices as part of my official work. This assisted in a getting a better perspective on a whole lot of issues covered in this book.
The look and feel and the shape of the individual essays owe much to the incisive interventions and error-spotting ability of Karthik Venkatesh, our editor. The errors that remain, are undeniably mine.
T.C.A. Ranganathan
Between the two of us, my cousin and I have read so many books on the Indian economy that we decided to take revenge. Hence this book.
The number of persons a professional journalist must acknowledge in a book of this nature is altogether too long. We interact with so many people that we lose count. And over forty years, its simply impossible to remember everyone, or who said what.
So let me just say thank you to all those with whom I have had the good fortune to discuss public policy over nearly half-a-century. They include politicians, civil servants, priests of various persuasions because economic policy without sociology is pointless, commercial bankers, central bankers, economists of all varieties and hues, historians, lawyers, judges, diplomats, doctors, publishers, journalistsand, above all, our extended family which contains all of the above.
