Governance at close quarters

Book review of Portraits of Power: Half a Century of Being at Ringside

Portraits of Power: Half a Century of Being at Ringside 

Author: N K Singh

Publisher: Rupa

Pages: 472

Price: Rs 595

This book is a treasure trove for those who wonder what happens within the apparatus of governance they fund with their taxes, between Parliament and the executive, between ministers and bureaucrats. How did the 1991 reforms or the Vajpayee reforms happen? When did the ascendancy of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) begin?   

The answers emerge in a most engaging way between the lines of a flowing autobiography, starting from the author’s privileged childhood as the first son of an Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer in a family rooted in the upper reaches of feudal Bihar.   

Nand Kishore Singh has seen government from every conceivable angle. He was in the belly of the beast as a serving officer of the Indian Adminis­trative Service (IAS) from 1964 until he retired in 2001. He had several spells in the finance ministry, including coveted ones as revenue secretary and expenditure secre­tary and, after retirement, was a member of the Planning Commission. Following the National Democratic Alliance’s electoral defeat in 2004, he moved to Bihar where he became deputy chairman of the State Planning Board before being nominated by the Janata Dal (U) party to the Rajya Sabha. He took an active interest in the many laws passed during his six-year term in Parliament from 2008 to 2014.   

He chaired the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Committee app­ointed in 2016 to take a fresh look at fiscal deficit and debt trajectories. Follow­ing that, he was appointed chairman of the Fifteenth Finance Commission, which has just submitted its report. There is no aspect of government he has not seen at close quarters.

N K Singh was among the bureaucrats in the finance ministry who shepherded the 1991 reforms, when there was total alignment of purpose between them 

and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh. At the same time, the author with his deep knowledge of government knows that what was achieved could only have been with support from above.  To quote one of the best sentences of the book, in the context of the goods and services tax in 2017: “Finance ministers are only as effective as the PM chooses to make them.”   

As a Member of Parliament, he was on the prestigious Public Accounts Committee (PAC), “the most intrusive arm of Parliament in the working of the executive,” having had prior experience of deposing before it as revenue secretary. Along with the work, the author clearly enjoyed Central Hall, a convivial space, “a great leveller, dismantling any hierarchy that exists in anyone’s mind” where there is “little reverence for past positions or domain knowledge”.

The best chapter of the book deals with his years in the Prime Minister Vajpayee’s PMO. There are excellent summaries of the reforms of that period, in telecommuni­cations, and the roads programme, including the revolutionary Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana. However, there is no mention of the biggest fiscal reform of that period, begun pre-Vajpayee but completed during his tenure, whereby small savings were shifted out of the Union budget into a separate public account, laying the ground for the subsequent reduction in the term structure of interest rates. 

N K Singh was associated with an annual summer conference in Stanford which gathered together a charmed circle of Indian academics, bureaucrats and politicians to debate economic policy in India. He sees the telecom sector as having benefited from the advice of Indian Silicon Valley giants, who attended (and funded) the Stanford conference. 

The failure to reform the functioning of government itself is not dealt with in any detail, but acknowledged in passing, with the following quote: “As finance minister, Dr Manmohan Singh had remarked to me that before we sought reforms in multiple areas, one area that needed to be improved was the Ministry of Finance itself.” Much remains to be done. 

There certainly have been vast improvements in the premises of North Block, some of which the author was responsible for, such as preserving the art in the Fresco Room. Not so long ago, the central courtyard was filled with old files and pigeon droppings. As for the corridors, the author was on one occasion accompanying the CEO of Morgan Stanley when, “as we were walking on one side of the corridor of North Block, we were startled to find on the other side, a line of monkeys strolling with us parallelly”. 

Such experiences aside from traumatising visitors, would also have heightened their sense of superiority. I was shocked to read of the way Larry Summers, Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, interrogated Vajpayee on how he expected to eliminate poverty rather in the manner of administering an oral examination to a graduate student.  Vajpayee, after one of his long, famously unnerving silences, responded brilliantly. “You tell me. You are, after all, the Magic Man.” 

N K Singh has had a many-splendoured life, with an interlude in Japan as economic counsellor in the Indian Embassy, when he did art photography and oversaw the Maruti-Suzuki partnership. In India, he was a personal friend of great classical singers such as Pandit Jasraj.  He enjoyed the annual winter visit to Davos with the sense of delicious exclusivity it bestowed on the attendees. 

But the book is charmingly inclusive with text and pictures covering his entire family, including his younger sisters Krishna and Radha who became fellow officers in the Bihar cadre. The author has woven together strands from his personal and professional lives into a riveting tapestry.