An insider's view

Competition Commission Chairman Ashok Chawla is a veteran bureaucrat and well placed to understand the functioning of government, his last stint being finance secretary. As a panelist at the New Delhi leg of the PwC-Business Standard CEO Summit, therefore, he was in a good position to answer a member of the audience who claimed to have worked for the government early in his career and asked why it refuses to address the concerns of industry. ''I think you did the right thing by leaving the government,'' Chawla joked in reply, though, on a serious note, he added that the system is such that people want to retain control.