Death in the family

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I have lost another brother – this time the eldest one who was a kind of father figure, especially since all of us collected at Bhopal after our respective retirements. He, Sanjoy Bagchi, surviving for 90 years somehow lost the battle with multiple ailments. Towards the end he went under a total life support system but started to sink and eventually passed away on the 20^th evening.

He was a lively person and was a foodie and loved the best of liquors and wines which he could afford being a UN pensioner. Even a few months back he would have “mangoras” and pakoras at the Arera Club to go with his regulation tots in the evenings. Having been to every continent he had developed a keen interest in different cuisines. He was even adept in cooking Mexican paella. It was he who told me to try Schnitzel in Vienna when my wife and I were going there on a brief visit.

He was a precocous child who turned out to be a very bright young man. He scored 240 out of 300 at the IAS interviews in 1953 along with another batch-mate who I think was K. Natwar Singh. He was a voracious reader. After getting into the IAS he became a member of the World Book Society and got Sir Winston Churchill’s six volumes on the Second World War. Eventually he built up a huge library of around 5000 books, most of them hard cover, which he donated to the MP Institute of Good Governance named after Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a friend from his college days. His philanthropy was phenomenal. He used to donate money to several institutions which he felt were deserving of his compassion. He provided financial support for the family of the help he had had for the last twenty years. The Arera Club was his first love and he went and donated Rs 5 Lakh to it for installation of a lift.

In his career at the UN agency of GATT his Director General continued him as his consultant for two decades. Later his distinguished stint at the GATT saw him installed as Executive Director of a “non-official” body of International Textile Control Board by representatives of several countries some of which were not very friendly with India. Textiles were his forte having been Additional Textile Commissioner and Textile Commissioner of India for substantial lengths of time.

A good life – with some lows and many highs – has now come to an end. Hopefully, he will meet up with those from the family who preceded him and have gone where all mortals go after their life on the planet comes to an end.  I, who is left behind, can only wish eternal peace for his soul 

Unlamented demise of India's Planning Commission

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Shiv Vishwanathan, an intellectual and a social scientist, in his article on 26^th August in the prestigious newspaper The Hindu eulogised the Planning Commission. He is sorry to see it go without any funerary lamentations for its demise. While he may be right but the Commission had in a last few decades been functioning with a disconnect with ground realities. It, in fact, had become more an agency for distribution of largesse to the states than for planning for poverty alleviation, leave alone prosperity of the country.

 It was a relic of Nehruvian Fabian socialist phase of our economy which neither made us socialists nor capitalists. It left us eventually as a pseudo-socialist economy that made rich richer and left the middle classes and the poor where they were – struggling for survival in a regime of escalating prices and rising frustrations. Strangely, the Commission did not even manage to identify the poor. It came up from time to time with some weird figures for identifying the urban and rural poor.

With the Commission’s planners flying high up in the stratosphere making economic models for development that neither enabled the country to prosper nor eliminated widespread poverty in the sixty years of its predominance in economic planning for the country. In 1961 our Economics professors in the National Academy Administration would wax eloquent on how the country was poised for the “take-off” stage. From all evidences, even after more than fifty years the country is yet to take off, with so much poverty and pervasive malnutrition.

 Twenty years later, in 1980 while plying the participants in the advanced course in Public Administration in the Indian Institute of Public Administration with complicated mathematical economic models, Prof. Sukhomoy Chatterji, the then Member of the Planning Commission, was asked whether any provision was made for “Garibi Hatao”, Indira Gandhi’s slogan that swept her to power in 1971, in the economic model he promptly answered in the affirmative and pointed at the addition made in it. “Garibi” persists even thirty years after that, although millions were lifted from poverty after the economy was freed from controls in 1991 –not by courtesy of the Commission.

That the Yojana Bhawan will now not be the haunt of dreamers, econometrists and the unlikely bureaucrat should be a happy augury. For sixty years the country carried on its shoulders a mammoth monolith without much returns. Now that it is gone, it is a good riddance, perhaps a time to celebrate.