A K Bhattacharya: The return of a policy wonk

BACKSTAGE

The ease with which he recites shlokas from Sanskrit texts can impress even his worst detractors.

Purists may find fault with the anglicised accent he uses, but he leaves no one in doubt about his erudition and knowledge of the ancient language. And no one who knows him will disagree that Prahlad Kumar Basu is a man with a penchant for displaying his knowledge.

Early this month, the government appointed Basu as the chairman of the Board for Reconstruction of Public Sector Enterprises. Not because he could recite shlokas with an English accent.

Basu's academic and professional credentials can be anybody's envy. He is an MA in Economics from Cambridge and has a doctorate in business administration.

Not content with this, he bagged a few more degrees in management and public administration from the universities of London and New York.

One of the earliest members of the Industrial Management Pool, a cadre launched to draft experts and professional managers from the private sector into government service, Basu occupied several key positions in the Central government in the 1980s.

He headed the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), which then came under the administrative control of the finance ministry. As the director general of BPE, a secretary-level post, Basu decided on the policies to be followed by the central public sector undertakings.

Basu wielded considerable clout in enforcing government directives such as the price preference policy for the PSUs.

Moving on, he spent a few years as secretary in the ministry of steel and mines. It was a huge portfolio, with several PSUs under his control.

His importance grew when Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister and appointed him as the secretary in charge of the planning ministry. That was when he came in close touch with Manmohan Singh, who was then the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission.

More significantly, Rajiv Gandhi gave Basu additional charge of heading the newly-created ministry of programme implementation. His colleagues from the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) did not like Basu's new role.

As the programme implementation secretary, he was expected to monitor major projects and programmes in each ministry, a job that he undertook with gusto and enterprise.

His monthly reports on the progress of these projects brought out the usual decision-making delays and bureaucratic apathy that came in the way of their timely execution. There was no love lost between the IAS secretaries and Basu.

His critics say that Basu never believed that discretion was the better part of valour. So when he headed a committee on public sector projects, he made some useful and controversial recommendations on how to prepare public sector projects and implement them to avoid delays in their execution.

Like many other reports of expert committees, this one, too, made newspaper headlines when it was submitted to the government. But it was soon forgotten.

While many of his other colleagues in the Industrial Management Pool preferred to go back to the private sector or became consultants, he opted for teaching, a profession he thought was his first love. He went back to the UK and took up teaching assignments as a professor of management in universities at Reading, London, Cambridge and Nottingham.

The United Nations made him a member of its ad hoc experts group on governance and public administration for poverty reduction. Subsequently, Basu set up the Strategic Management Group, a body he describes as an apex level independent think tank of India.

In the past 15 years since he quit the government, Basu has worked on the effectiveness of poverty alleviation programmes and on improving access to rural finance in India.

But the work, which may have been responsible for his return to the government, is the book he wrote on India's public sector. Basu describes it as an in-depth examination of the policy decisions taken by the Indian government on strategic aspects of performance evaluation of its PSUs.

The question he seeks to answer is whether such performance evaluation leads to performance improvement. It is clear that his stint as the programme implementation secretary has been the inspiration behind the book.

There is no doubt his new assignment is going to be his biggest challenge of his career. And given his experience, the government could not have found a better candidate to head such a committee. But reconstructing PSUs in today's political environment can be a minefield.

And every step Basu takes may set off a political controversy. Whatever he says or does, therefore, will be watched with great interest.