 "<b>Lunch with BS:</b> M R Madhavan")
He didn’t want to go “anywhere fancy”. I needed a place without loud musak. YWCA Kitchen on Parliament Street, he suggests. A canteen wouldn’t be suitable, I venture, thinking of the standing-room-only UNI eatery near the Reserve Bank of India; he assures me it isn’t anything like that. When I arrive, I realise M R Madhavan, co-founder and president of PRS Legislative Research, has made an excellent choice. The cosy, unpretentious décor, interesting menu and unobtrusive soft rock make me wonder why I hadn’t heard of it.
Being a regular, Madhavan, who retains the air of a brainy, absent-minded undergrad despite his salt-and-pepper hair, navigates the menu with familiarity. We settle for Chicken Mini Toast as a shared starter and Koomu Bhartad, a Coorgi dish of mushroom, crushed black pepper and lemon juice served with rice, for him and an old-fashioned Chicken Pot Pie for me.
PRS Legislative Research, now into its 11th year, is a first-of-its-kind nonprofit that has built a solid reputation as a resource for policy and legal analysis to Members of Parliament regardless of party affiliation (edit writers gratefully partake of its research too).
Prima facie, Madhavan seems least qualified to set up such an outfit. His thesis at IIM, Calcutta was an econometric study related to finance. He had worked with ICICI Securities in equity and, later, fixed income research, then with Bank of America on interest rates and currency in Mumbai and Singapore.
“True, I had never met an MP in my life before PRS,” he says, but he made the jump after former ICICI colleague and roommate C V Madhukar, a Kennedy School of Government scholar and World Banker who also worked with Pratham, the education NGO, and Azim Premji Foundation, sounded him out about the idea. “We didn’t know whether MPs would take to it, but I was a little bored with my work and was willing to give it a try.”
It was one heck of a risk, surely? “People overestimate the risk. At the time, I said I would commit two years and see where it went. Many of us are fortunate to have degrees and work experience, we do have market value, so it’s not difficult to find a job. Also, I don’t own too many assets and have no liabilities.” I tell him Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal once said if you wanted to start something, don’t take a home loan. “My only major cash flow is for the apartment I rent,” he grins. As it turned out, PRS started getting good traction from MPs within Madhavan’s two-year deadline.
PRS’ model as a public interest service that would be free — and this remains an article of faith — was the Congressional Research Service (CRS), under the Library of Congress. The core of the service is to be strictly non-partisan —”never give a recommendation, never take a position. Be factual. That’s what we do”. Of course, the CRS has a budget of over $100 million. PRS’? Considerably less, Madhavan replies with a straight face.
More From This Section
The starter arrives as Madhavan explains how they were given the sound advice that PRS should be incubated by an institution. Centre for Policy Research (CPR) was a good fit because, under Pratap Bhanu Mehta, it had developed a reputation for neutrality.
Why did PRS move out in 2013, I ask biting into a square of toast liberally topped with smoked chicken minced with garlic and coriander mayo. In the interests of sustainable institution-building, he says. “Our arrangement worked well with CPR because of personalities like Pratap and the current board. But they might not always be there, I might not be around, Madhukar had already left for urgent personal reasons. So we decided to make the shift when things were going well,” he explains.
Things didn’t always go well. The original funding was from Ford Foundation — a modest ~40 lakh (“I was earning more at BankAm,” he jokes), plus some projects from UN bodies. Google.org chipped in for three years, Ford continued for another three, which helped PRS as far as 2010.
“Then the saga started with the FCRA [the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act]”. It was suspected then that PRS was one of several nonprofits to suffer collateral damage from then finance minister P Chidambaram’s crackdown following NGO protests over the Kudankulam nuclear plant, though Madhavan doesn’t speculate. The outfit had registered as a “Section 25” or not-for-profit company under the Companies Act as the Institute for Policy Research Studies. They had also been talking to Ford Foundation and Omidyar Network (PRS co-founder Madhukar now works in the Indian office), both of which committed grants. Being a new entity, PRS needed government permission to access foreign funding.
This should have been a breeze. When the application was made, Madhavan says, it did not occur to them to request the 300-plus MPs, who now used their service to lobby. “If I am doing something honest why should I ask for favours? Unfortunately, this country does not work on those principles.” When the permission did not come in the stipulated three months, they put it down to bureaucratic delay. After 11 months, in 2012, a letter arrived, the gist of which was that permission had been rejected “in public interest — whatever that means”.
I realise I have wolfed down more than my share of the starter and guiltily push the plate towards my guest, who is talking about surviving those traumatic days. "By mid-2011, we had run out of money, so we started to raise domestic funding as a stop-gap arrangement. When permission was refused, we actually spoke to MPs across parties and they tried to get it reversed, but nothing happened. Fortunately, every month, some angel would rescue us.”
Running on domestic funding is tough, because foreign funders tend to commit larger amounts in one go. Now, PRS manages largely by diversifying the donor base. Tata Trust is the latest, but he mentions Rohini Nilekani chipping in, as well as Vikram Lal of the Eicher family and stock market “big bull” Rakesh Jhunjhunwala. I am surprised by the last name, I say, but it turns out that he has been a well-wisher. Jhunjhunwala introduced them to his mentor Radhakishan Damani, investor and owner of the hypermarket chain D-Mart.
The pot pie is a goodly portion, though I am disappointed to see the flaky pastry crust rather than short-crust, which would have gone better with the gravy filling. The Koomu Bhartad looks tantalising but the portion is adequate for one, precluding my intentions to poach. As I break the pie crust, I ask whether his interaction with MPs reinforced the dim view of the standard of parliamentary debate.
No, he replies unequivocally and explains why. When Parliament is in session, PRS holds hour-long, closed-door (that is, no media) briefing sessions for MPs, two mornings a week. On Wednesdays, they get an external issue to talk on, an issue they want to understand, and on Thursdays they discuss what’s coming up in the session.
“Even in December, 15 or 20 MPs turned up. Why do they do it? Nobody is going to get brownie points. They come because they are interested. The good thing in these sessions is that nobody is being politically correct, so the quality of discussion is pretty good. The idea is to let MPs have some place where they may disagree with the party position, but it doesn’t cost them.”
In fact, he says, there have been times when Congress MPs have been sceptical about foreign direct investment in retail and the Bharatiya Janata Party MPs have supported it. Equally, when Arun Kumar spoke about black money and explained that part of the problem was election funding, several MPs were not very happy about the situation but were trapped by it.
One reason for the low quality of parliamentary debate is that MPs don’t have the resources to do research and that’s the gap PRS tries to bridge, he adds. In the US, each senator gets $3-4 million a year for staff, from which they can hire 50 to 60 people. In the UK, which is about the size of Maharashtra, MPs get £140,000 a year, which gets them four or five staffers. India? “We give them ~30,000 for staff and you know what we can get for that. It’s the reverse here — we give them housing but no support staff, whereas elsewhere they give them support staff but no housing.”
But in the old days, MPs went to Parliament Library and researched, I start to say righteously, when he retorts, “Well, if I go to the Tata Motors shop floor and see Cyrus Mistry working there I will sell Tata Motors stock immediately!”
The other part of PRS’ work is to inform citizens about what their representatives are doing by tracking how MPs vote in Parliament. It is instructive to know, for instance, that despite all the sound and fury over the December 16, 2012 rape, only 203 out of 543 MPs were present in the Lok Sabha when the new rape laws were passed.
We decide to share a Tiramisu and a pot of coffee as he tells me how they are gradually extending their service to MLAs as well, no small challenge “since many states are reasonably dysfunctional”. “In Haryana, for instance, every Bill for the last 14 years has been passed without any discussion at all, often on the same day. So where does PRS get in?
As I pay a bill in which taxes inflate a shockingly reasonable total, I ask whether he ever faced pressure to further donor agendas. PRS safeguards against this by having a rule that donors cannot be on the board. “For us, that’s a disqualification. In any case, most of the money comes from individuals and we've never had to face this issue.”
But he did have a potential donor, an industrialist who chaired a sector at Confederation of Indian Industry, walk away when Madhavan declined to write a report supporting a certain agenda. He asked why he should give PRS money in that case. “I told him, but you give money to schools, and that’s a public good, why do you do that? He replied that he only gave money to schools near his factories so that he can buy goodwill and get an educated workforce! I realised I wasn’t going to get any money from him so I left and sent him a thank-you note for meeting me.”