Shekhar Shah, Director General of the economic think tank, National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), tells Vrishti Beniwal how he plans to strike a balance between market expectations and the research interests of its faculty. Excerpts:
How will your experience at the World Bank help?
In the past five years as regional economic advisor for South Asia with the World Bank, I have been witness to the transformation underway in India, with rapid economic growth and greater attention to social and developmental issues in health and education, greater awareness of the accountability of the government for service delivery, and citizen pressure for greater efficiency in public programmes.
All this creates immense space for an institute like NCAER to contribute to policy analysis, evidence-based policy making, public debate and informing the direction, implementation, valuation of policies and programmes.
What will be your key priorities?
Three dimensions are very important for NCAER — quality of what we do, relevance of what we do so that we pick things likely to be at the forefront of thinking and, finally, impact.
The government’s interaction with think tanks has increased over the years. Still, it is felt their focus remains the corporate sector.
For a policy research institute, it is very important to find its comparative advantage and niche. There are some who have found their niche in catering to just government or semi government while some have found it in the corporate sector.
NCAER has the unique advantage that it has catered to all sectors of the economy, including infrastructure, agriculture, decentralisation, human development, health and education, and the macro economy. My interest is very much in looking at the interface with the government and the way it provides services or has public policies and programmes.
With the growth of rival think tanks, it is felt NCAER has fallen behind. How do you plan to revive it?
I have no idea who is first or second or third. I think the more the competition between these institutions for ideas, analysis, positions, important and key issues, the better it is. I am delighted we have very rich institutions like Icrier, NIPFP, Centre for Policy Research and IDF.
About four years earlier, during the Budget discussions in February, I proposed to support an event where all the five institutions would be on the podium and each one deals with one aspect of the Budget whether its fiscal, monetary policy, external, service delivery, human development or the politics of the Budget. I said let us all sit together and, you don’t have to coordinate, you can have your independent view but it would be one composite view. So, every year we come together as five heads of these institutes. Further, my own predilection is for as much synergy and as much give and take between these institutes.
How do you plan to widen the scope of NCAER?
I may want to consolidate and focus energies on specific areas. There is always a tension between breadth and depth for institutions like NCAER which is independent and depends for its revenues on assignments that it gets in addition to grants, money and funded research. We have to think about our competitive advantage and what we are likely to do best. I am very open to ideas and, to some extent, we have to let the market talk. If the market wants NCAER to do something, then we have to respond.
At the same time, our faculty has individual interests and we need to cater to those because that’s what makes this place intellectually stimulating. So, it is a balance between these things we have to strike.
Do you feel there is a greater need to attract talent?
It is very important to have a hospitable and intellectuality stimulating work environment. Our effort will be to make NCAER a very attractive place, particularly for younger people. That’s where the new ideas, new techniques, new skills and just the sheer raw energy to pursue a question come from.
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How do you look at the functioning of think tanks in India, compared with developed countries?
A large part of effort that complements the very good scholarship and research in many of these institutes abroad is on communication and outreach. How do we get the message out? It is not that we don’t have enough seminars and workshops, but an additional effort is required to take out the technical jargon from what we say, to be able to express the key ideas in ways which they can be understood easily. All of this is part and parcel of what institutes do everywhere.
There is a view that most of the work done by think tanks is academic in nature and there is a need to make it more relevant for policy.
All research is academic in some sense, because unless it has strong methodologies, unless it is robust and defensible and can pass the test of other experts, it is usually no good. So, it has to be rigorous, yes, but one should be able to communicate in a way which is easily comprehensible. Already, there is a dramatic change from what we were a few years before, but we have to do more.