A sedate ringside view

Mr Khanna's narrative is easy to read and as simply structured as the notes he must have written as an IAS officer

Officers of the Indian Administrative Service or IAS have a ringside view of important developments in the country’s economic and political history. Often, they are also among the main actors shaping or contributing to those developments. Tejendra Khanna had the fortune of being both. He had a ringside view of how several economic policy decisions were taken before and after the reforms of 1991. Subsequently, he also became a key player in Delhi’s governance structure, conceiving and implementing many of the decisions taken by the government of the day.

This is a book that is largely devoted to capturing these developments during his working life of about 52 years — from 1961 to 2013, first as an IAS officer and later as the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi. There are important lessons that he picks up in this journey.

One such lesson was what he learnt as a trainee from the director of the IAS Academy, Aditya Nath Jha, an ICS officer. When Jha was asked by him and other IAS probationers that why they never saw him doing much work except sitting under the shade of a Deodar tree and reading a book, the reply was deeply etched in Mr Khanna’s mind. Officers must learn to delegate responsibilities, but not give up monitoring how those responsibilities were being discharged.

In his younger days, Mr Khanna had earned the reputation of an officer who would take bold and risky decisions. In May 1969, he was asked by the government to head Punjab Tractors Limited, a state-owned undertaking struggling to make tractors that were in great demand from farmers in the state. He invited the Durgapur-based Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute or CMERI to offer its tractor-making know-how to the company he was heading. This was the same technology that the Indian government had rejected. But Mr Khanna decided to go for it and within a couple of years, that tractor, Swaraj Tractors, became hugely popular. Eventually, Punjab Tractors was acquired by the Mahindras, which ironically had turned down Mr Khanna’s earlier request to set up a tractor manufacturing plant in Punjab.

Equally bold was his decision to construct a canal to draw water from the Bhakra dam for the Ropar thermal plant, when the latter’s water flows were disrupted after a blast caused by a terrorist attack. He risked his career by that decision, but it helped the launch of a thermal plant in the state.

In contrast, his two-year stint as a chief controller of imports and exports, brought out a different streak in Mr Khanna. He stuck to the rule book and rarely displayed the kind of enterprise he had showed in the past or he would show in the future. As food secretary, Mr Khanna showed his canny business sense by securing imports of over 3 million tonnes of wheat at competitive prices, by playing the Australian wheat export authorities against those in Canada and the US.

Caution and circumspection seem to have influenced his narrative on his role as commerce secretary in arranging sugar imports that triggered a major controversy. That caution is replaced with candour when he defends his role as the commerce secretary by not committing to any liberalisation of India’s foreign investment norms at the Singapore meeting of the World Trade Organisation, a move that had earned him the sobriquet of being a Swadeshi.

It was in his second stint as Delhi’s Lieutenant Governor that Mr Khanna took a series of significant decisions. One of those big decisions pertained to the introduction of a mixed land use policy, allowing the conversion of specified residential spaces for commercial purposes on payment of charges. This was a decision that irreversibly changed Delhi’s urban landscape.

His narrative is easy to read and as simply structured as the notes he must have written as an IAS officer. But there are many problems with the way he has chosen to describe a few of the controversial developments with which he was associated. Questions will be raised over the way he presents a watered-down version of the fiasco on the execution of the Commonwealth Games project in 2010 or the way he underplays some of the events that had a significant bearing on the country’s politics.