In search of economists
Last week, the Union government announced the appointment of Pravin Srivastava as its chief statistician, filling a post that had remained vacant for over eight months. While the government may pat itself on the back for finding a successor to T C A Anant, who had completed his tenure as chief statistician on January 31 this year, the fact is that the inordinately long period it took to fill the vacancy is a cause for concern.
There is, of course, good reason for students and analysts of the Indian economy to heave a sigh of relief now that there is someone at the chief statistician’s level in the government to provide leadership to its efforts at overseeing and strengthening the systems of collecting data and conducting surveys. Unfortunately, however, the eight-month-long delay in filling the vacancy has raised many disturbing questions on the way the Modi government has gone about filling key posts that need to be manned by professional economists or experts.
For instance, there is as yet no clear explanation why the government took as long as eight months in appointing a chief statistician. The government knew well before January 2018 that Mr Anant’s date of superannuation was approaching. He was hired by the Manmohan Singh government and he joined as the chief statistician in July 2010 to succeed Pronab Sen immediately after the latter’s tenure ended. So, why wasn’t a search committee to select Mr Anant’s successor set up well in advance to ensure that the vacancy does not last longer than a few days or at worst a couple of weeks?
More disturbing is the thought that Mr Srivastava has been given a tenure that will end by August 2020. If the government had to work hard for eight months to find a suitable candidate for the post of chief statistician, why didn’t it think of giving Mr Srivastava a longer tenure of, say, three or even five years?
Another disturbing thought pertains to the response to the government’s search for Mr Anant’s successor. The chief statistician of the Indian government is a secretary-level post with all its perquisites and responsibilities. If the government failed to elicit a reasonable response from experts and professionals from the field of statistics, it is time the government did some introspection to find out why established names in the field of statistics would not like to even apply for as prestigious a job as that of the chief statistician.
This is not to raise any doubts about the competence or expertise of Mr Srivastava, who has now been chosen to head the central statistics office. But if the government had found Mr Srivastava to be the best candidate among all the applicants, why was there a delay of about eight months in arriving at that decision? After all, Mr Srivastava was an internal candidate and as additional director general in the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation had been intimately involved with the functioning of the department for the last several years.
This question is also pertinent with regard to the current exercise that is going on in the finance ministry to find a successor to Arvind Subramanian, who announced his decision to quit as chief economic advisor (CEA) in the third week of June 2018. The government acted quickly and had sought applications from candidates in early July, and the last date of submitting applications was July 20. This gave rise to the hope that a decision to appoint Mr Subramanian’s successor will be taken quickly and perhaps within days of his departure. His resignation took effect from July 27.
However, more than two months have gone by since then, the government is yet to announce a successor to Mr Subramanian. This has given rise to speculation about whether the government intends to appoint a CEA at all till after the coming general elections. In September 2013, the Manmohan Singh government shifted Raghuram Rajan from his North Block job as CEA to head the Reserve Bank of India as its governor. For a little more than a year, until Mr Subramanian joined in October 2014 as the CEA, the government had kept that position vacant.
Once again, the government may opt for a strategy that was adopted in 2013. There is also a possibility that just as an internal candidate from within the ministry of statistics was selected as chief statistician, an internal candidate from the finance ministry may be elevated to the CEA’s post.
Whatever may be the final decision of the government, two trends in the way the governments in the past couple of decades have dealt with the question of filling vacancies of economists in key positions are noticeable. One, the government’s bench strength of economists or technocrats is almost zero. There aren’t too many economists or professional experts, other than officials of the Indian Administrative Service, who are available to be picked up from different departments in the government. This is unlike in the 1980s or the 1990s, when there would be a relative abundance of professional economists and technocrats within the government system. Just think of the talent pool then — C Rangarajan, Vijay Kelkar, Rakesh Mohan and Arvind Virmani, to name just a few!
Two, the professional economists and technocrats those days would be given a relatively long tenure and this would allow them to think long-term in their policy interventions and provide stability as well as continuity to policymaking. As a result, Montek Singh Ahluwalia would get a long uninterrupted stint as finance secretary in the government from 1992 to 1998 and Shankar N Acharya would function as CEA from 1993 to 2001.
The big difference between the 1990s and the last 18 years is that while the economists in the government then were part of the system for a long period, the few government economists now are there for short stints of two to three years, after which they often return to the jobs they originally came from. The government needs to deliberate on how to rebuild a pool of economists who could contribute to the bench strength of talent to help steer economic policy management in a far more complex and risk-prone economy.