Memories of Saumitra
SUBIR GOKARN writes about the memories of an association that started in the dingy offices of the Bureau of Industrial Costs and Prices.
Saumitra Chaudhuri’s passing away evoked many memories of a long association. In the summer of 1981, immediately after our MA exams were over, my batchmate Trichur Ganesh and I heard about summer jobs being offered in the Bureau of Industrial Costs and Prices (BICP). Long story short, we were hired as “consultants”, which was basically a catch-all designation for temporary employees at all levels. We were seated in a large room, which also had a couple of semiprivate spaces, one of which was occupied by Saumitra. We were working on the cement industry; I can’t recall what he was working on, but he took on a mentoring role, chatting with us, full of information and advice on everything under the sun. A few weeks after that assignment ended, I re-joined BICP on a somewhat longer-term basis — still a consultant — this time, on an elaborate study of the steel industry. Saumitra was a member of this team. The year-and-ahalf I spent on that project was, in hindsight, a great start to my career — rich in exposure to economists, accountants, engineers… an eyeopener to the real world of policymaking. Saumitra’s involvement was a big part of that experience.
When I returned to India after my PhD, some of that old group reconnected and were in regular contact. A couple of years later, Saumitra joined ICRA. In his role as economic advisor, he launched an initiative to publish research monographs on specific industries. My colleague Rajendra Vaidya and I had just published a paper on the cement industry, which, he suggested, could be the basis of a more detailed monograph. He himself had published one on cotton spinning and had commissioned one on steel by Ramprasad Sengupta, who had earlier led the project at BICP. After ours was published by ICRA, he commissioned a second one from us on automobile components. That work did not end up as a monograph, but some years later, found a place as a chapter in a volume on Indian industry that was edited by Rajendra, Anindya Sen and myself.
In 2002, I joined CRISIL, in many ways playing the same role that Saumitra was at ICRA. We could have been rivals, but that characterisation never really fit. We met regularly, usually at seminars and such or consultations with government to which rating agencies were invited. He continued to provide his unique mix of facts, interpretation and critique whenever we met with, of course, the occasional dig at our “rivalry”. He had, by then, initiated the bimonthly journal, Money and Finance, which combined academic research papers submitted by outside scholars with his own detailed write-up on the state of the global and Indian economies. The obsession with detail, which every tribute I’ve seen so far has referred to, was never more on display than in this write-up. This was in sharp contrast to the format that my team and I had designed for CRISIL — more frequent, much shorter and produced entirely in-house. To each his own, I guess.
Saumitra continued with ICRA after he was appointed member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council in 2014. We continued to meet as we did before, at gatherings, which occasionally allowed us to have longer conversations. Things never really changed between us despite his elevated public profile. Looking back over those years, it should have been obvious that his efforts and contributions would lead him to a larger role in government and so it was when he was appointed member of the Planning Commission in 2009.
I joined the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) just a few months after he joined the Commission. I guess this is one of those quirky things about government; notwithstanding the fact that we had overlaps in the issues that we dealt with in our respective organisations, we ended up interacting far less frequently than we had in our private sector avatars. Of course, he chaired a number of committees into which RBI inputs were provided, but I do not recall very many meetings during my three years there. I recall meeting fairly often with other members of the Commission, usually in connection with one committee or another, but somehow our paths didn’t intersect. After his term ended, we would run into each other occasionally at the India International Centre or other similar situations, but we were both usually rushing to other commitments, so we didn’t really get a chance to catch up.
Be that as it may, I carry the memories of an association that stretched from the dingy offices of BICP in Lok Nayak Bhawan to somewhat more opulent surroundings 20 and more years later. From regular lunches at a Lodi Estate school cafeteria to occasional meals together at more upscale places. But always with the incessant flow of information and opinion, seamlessly alternating, occasionally intimidating but always entertaining ! I am richer for having known you, Saumitra. Thank you for that.