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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Teaching the generations by Yoginder K Alagh

Teaching the generations by Yoginder K Alagh

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published Published on Jun 24, 2011   modified Modified on Jun 24, 2011

Being asked to write on Suresh Tendulkar means that the memories of four tumultuous decades crowd in. They are memories of a genuine teacher, a very careful researcher and an obstinately independent western Indian in Delhi. I always thought of him as a very competent and highly trained economist — but also as an obstinately autonomous Maratha in unfamiliar surroundings.

In the 1970s, while examining critiques of the draft Fifth Five-Year Plan for the Economic and Political Weekly, I argued that T.N. Krishnan from Trivandrum had demolished its logical structure by calculating that its numerical claims to bringing about self-reliance were obtained by assuming that imports would go down — and not from changing the consumption pattern in favour of the poor, which was the planners’ argument. Suresh, on the other hand, had shown that the Plan did not fit the past behaviour of consumption and imports, and my initial reaction was that planning changes the past.

But, on introspection, we were to understand that he was genuinely concerned about consumption — as people were starving in this country — and he also had a yen for markets and employment. So, when in my first stint in the Planning Commission, I was asked to head a task force to define the country’s poverty line, he was our choice as a member. His guidance there to young econometricians was what we came to know later as vintage Tendulkar. The behaviour of the poor and the rich on consumption and calories separately for rural and urban India was being modelled, with data-sets for over 20 years. No data-set was too large; no detail was too small. The grandeur of the objective was all-consuming.

His intolerance for what he thought as inessential and his absolute opposition to any compromise came through in day-to-day work. He was just not interested in the great academic controversy of the period — between Sukhatme and Dandekar, over the definition of the “calorie line”. He would not compromise an inch, however, on the prices the poor paid for their food. Since the information on that at the state level left much to be desired, I went along with him and said more work was necessary to develop state-level numbers — much to the chagrin of the officials involved.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Tendulkar cast his net far and wide. He was the great critic of planning, the protagonist of the market. He kept on plugging away at the Delhi School of Economics and generations of students venerated him. He was the first stop for visiting economists and global advisers. He was to publish extensively and prolifically, both in the academic literature and in consulting assignments with every possible global institution. Poverty, employment, decentralisation and economic policy were all in his repertoire, and he conducted them all with equal facility and competence.

This decade was his most influential for policy, and the years towards the end were those of the Tendulkar poverty committee. I interacted with him only twice recently: once was during the jubilee of the National Sample Survey Organisation, of which he was the chairman and I was invited to give a keynote or inaugural lecture. Suresh went hammer and tongs at officials and government agencies who don’t respect the autonomy of facts, or of institutions; I, somewhat sheepishly, tried to calm the troubled waters afterwards.

The last time was at Hyderabad. Dilip Nachane of the Bombay School of Economics was being felicitated, and we were both there to honour him as a teacher. He told me at the time that a piece I had written on “getting along with the Tendulkar committee” was perceptive; I kidded him that he did not bury the earlier work we had done in the 1970s, because he was also its creator. He just smiled. But he spent two days in that meeting commenting on the papers young economists, students of Nachane, had written with the same seriousness I suspect he took to the prime minister’s economic advisory council. I know one of them remembers what he said well — for he is my son.

The writer, a former Union minister, is chairman, Institute of Rural Management, Anand, express@expressindia.com

The Indian Express, 23 June, 2011, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/teaching-the-generations/807390/


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