Anup K Pujari, the new director-general of foreign trade, is not your quintessential bureaucrat. Chances are he will pick up the phone himself if his secretary doesn’t after two rings. He makes it a point to switch off lights and fans whenever he steps out for a meeting, even for a few minutes. And, he hardly turns on the do-not-disturb red light outside his North Block cabin. A 1980-batch Indian Administrative Service officer from the Karnataka cadre, Pujari is also a visiting faculty member at Harvard University.
Pujari, 54, spent the last four years handling the Foreign Investment Promotion Board and multilateral institutions in the finance ministry. He is no stranger to the Directorate General of Foreign Trade, having worked as additional DGFT at a time when quantitative restrictions on imports were lifted. During the QR era, as old-timers remember, DGFT — housed in a corner of Udyog Bhavan — was one of the key centres of power in Delhi, responsible for giving import licences.
Pujari oversaw the transition from this regime to one where almost anything, barring a small list of items, could be imported duty-free. While Pujari might have earned a doctorate in economics and spent several years in Boston, he does not fail to point out that he did not attend Orissa’s famous Ravenshaw College, which boasts several top civil servants, past and present, as its alumni. But that’s only one thing that helps him stand out from the bureaucratic crowd.
