Chief Economic Adviser Archives - Tiger and Palm Tree

As the Chairman of the Planning Commission, Prime Minister Nehru signs the draft first five year plan in 1951. To his right is Gulzarilal Nanda, Deputy Chairman. Behind Nanda is RK Patil (ICS, 1931), Member, who resigned from the service in 1943 for social work. Partially covered behind him is probably N Raghavan Pillai (ICS,1922), Cabinet Secretary and ex-officio Secretary to the Commission. To his right is Tarlok Singh, the Deputy Secretary, who served for long on the Commission earning it the moniker, Tarlok Sabha. Behind him is a young KN Raj, 27, who prepared the draft. To Nehru’s left are, in that order, CD Deshmukh, Finance Minister and Member, GL Mehta, later Indian Ambassador to the US (1952-58), and VT Krishnamachari, who we meet again and will encounter again.

Dr IG Patel’s tenure as Deputy Economic Adviser lasted from 1954 to 1959. By then, the first five year plan was already in progress. The work on the second plan had started. In the third part on IG’s life, we discuss a few major developments and other anecdotes. A detailed discussion on the second plan follows in another post. Continue reading “IG Patel as Deputy Economic Adviser”

Policy Maker's Journal by Kaushik Basu — Kaushik Basu and his book

Prof. Kaushik Basu in his “Policy Maker’s Journal” describes an incident where he and three friends, on a holiday in Cusco, Peru, were walking back to their hotel through deserted streets, when they saw a native girl, sitting alone and crying. Her mother had made her wait while she went home to fetch something. It was getting late, and she was hungry. But, they found food in her bag, and asked her to eat that. She said that they were for sale, and not for eating. They then bought some food, and gave her. We will never know whether she ate it. But, Kaushik was left “with an awareness of the human predicament that reading books and guzzling statistics cannot give.” Continue reading ““Policy Maker’s Journal” by Kaushik Basu”