LUNCH WITH BS: Parthasarathi Shome

His extensive travels have sharpened the FM's advisor's views on not just India's bureaucracy, but on even its new breed of writers and art collectors.

This may sound incredible but when advisor to the finance minister, Parthasarathi Shome, first heard the word as a 17-year-old, he asked, "What is economics?" The answer he got from his brother-in-law was, "Oh, it's somewhere between physics and anthropology." Shome was then enrolled at the Presidency College in Calcutta to study physics "" a subject he found "dry" "" after his father gently persuaded him that anthropology, his personal choice, may not make the best of careers. Four decades later, Shome concedes that things probably worked out for the best. He went on to top his university and proceeded on scholarship to the US and the rest, as they say, is history, writes Anjuli Bhargava.

We met for lunch at The Imperial's Spice Route in the capital. As we settled at a corner table in the lovely courtyard that extends from the main restaurant, Shome looked "" a rare thing these days "" unhurried and relaxed.

Economics has taken him to places anthropology may never have. Brought up by a father who firmly believed that travel is the best education, he has stayed at innumerable "dak bungalows" and "circuit houses" in India. With the "bug in him from childhood", Partho, as he is widely known, has visited 90-odd countries, around 40 on work and over 50 for the pure love of it. His personal favourites are Norway and New Zealand, the former for its "snow" "" as opposed to water "" falls, and the latter for its ability to encapsulate and deliver every possible natural formation in a drive from the north to the south.

On an emotional plane, Latin America tops his list. Work for the IMF took him there time and again for long periods. He has some of his closest friends there and speaks Spanish like a native. Although he's spent most of his professional life overseas (he's been in India 30 years and overseas for 27), he can't seem to shed his father's only request to him: that he serve the country. This is his third assignment at the request of the Indian government. One of his former bosses at the IMF hit the nail on the head when she said at his farewell, "I think Partho is happiest when he's on top of the Atlantic."

Travel has also embedded in him a love for art. He spends many a Sunday in Delhi walking through a museum or viewing an exhibition and is incredulous at how many Indians "" even among the ones he knows "" view art mainly as a commercial investment. Not much of a collector, his weakness is "naïve art", of which he has a small collection gathered from places as far flung as Haiti, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru or interior parts of Africa.

As we begin on our shared appetiser "" stir-fried chicken with bell peppers, which my maid at home does just marginally better "" our conversation moves closer home and to not so happy issues like India's poverty and problems. Growing up in Calcutta during those days, he couldn't help but be infected by some Marxist ideas and even today thinks the Marxists have their heart in the right place; it's only their solutions he doesn't buy. "You can't keep redistributing an ungrowing pie," he says. He likes the Scandinavian country models where a largely socialist system is followed after growth has occurred. Yet, he's conscious that in India's case, it's far more complex: India, unlike those countries, is not small or homogeneous. Here it's about redistributing both from the rich to the poor and from one region to the other. That redistribuition, he argues, is critical. "The inclusiveness of growth is more important than growth itself," he believes. Poverty is a shame, the widening gap in incomes is "frightening" and 藼 million of us have overwhelmed the considerations of 750 million others".

I argue that it's too late and in no one's true interest to worry about this 750 million. But he's quick to counter that. It's never too late. If we are "ruthless about accountability" and the judiciary takes on the role of monitoring, there is hope.

We are halfway through the lunch "" Shome is eating some delicious crabs and I some inedible sweet Irachi stew with cold appams "" when I realise we've barely discussed his stint in the finance ministry, reforms and other more important matters. I quickly ask him whether he's as baffled by his colleagues in the ministry as they are by him.

I have clearly hit a tender spot. He sits up straighter, slams his hand on the table and proceeds to dig his teeth into the Indian bureaucrat. Nothing personal here but he's convinced that the "bureaucracy simply must change!" Its approach is too rudimentary, it needs to specialise ("you can't do housing one day, animal husbandry the next, and move on to whatever's the third, and be good at it all, it's not done anywhere in the world"), it has too many perceived systemic interests and no firm beliefs! Even in tiny Uruguay and Costa Rica, specialist lawyers negotiate for the country.

I weakly defend the bureaucrat's cause by arguing that they perhaps find academicians' ways impractical. That, he maintains, is an irrelevant plea for maintaining the status quo. In several countries, he's offered suggestions to the bureaucracy and many of them "" despite the apparent impracticality "" have been carried out to the country's greater benefit. The premier service of the Indian bureaucracy seems opposed to change, and change we must.

What, I ask, does he see as his main achievements during his stint in the ministry and what constitutes his unfinished agenda (his two-year term was smilingly yet determinedly extended by the finance minister to five). He visibly relaxes as he moves to a topic close to his heart: taxes. The reforms of the last three years, he says, have helped fundamentally change the basis for participation in tax payment. The taxpayer base (as opposed to the tax base) has expanded significantly and some sense has been brought into scrutiny procedures. The reforms are less visible to the public eye but will eventually lead to a simpler system for paying taxes. "We have given the tax administrator new and proper instruments to carry out its task, rather than just harass," he explains. State-level VAT and the Centre's large taxpayer units are other areas where he's been able to give his inputs.

On his agenda remain the committee report on the goods and services tax (GST) and its introduction (I point out that two years may be too little to introduce the GST; he lets it pass), the new income tax code, where he is partly involved, and computerisation of the tax departments. I exclaim that ever since I have been meeting him, he's been talking about this...it must be harder than it sounds. He explains that in the government, nothing is particularly easy, especially where tenders are involved. I guess we all know what that means.

We begin to wind down after our taxing discussion and he asks for an espresso with a lemon wedge. I ask him about some of his other interests, apart from travel and art. Well, he is into photography, and swims at the Delhi Gymkhana. A voracious reader, who grew up on Sarat Chandra and Rabindranath Tagore, he has a strange aversion to the Bengali writers of today ("Jhumpa Lahiri is insipid, Vikram Seth is contrived, Amitav Ghosh....anyone can write trash like Calcutta Chromosome"). He dislikes Rushdie with a passion ("atrocious and grotesque"), but loves Arundhuti Roy's single creation with an equal passion.

As we part, I ask him if his desk is any neater, my mind picturing the numerous times I've thought his room was unoccupied, so well hidden was he behind the mountain of files on his desk. "A bit, a bit. I'm a bit more in control now," he offers. The computerisation of the income tax department may or may not happen but, by the end of his stay, I think he'll crack this.