 "Suman Bery")
This 'Lunch with BS' interaction, originally published on March 29, 2011, is being republished, as Suman Bery is set to replace Rajiv Kumar, who has stepped down, as vice-chairman of the NITI Aayog from May 1, 2022.
It’s a few hours after Suman Bery has demitted office as Director General of the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER), the grey eminence of India’s think tanks, but he doesn’t have all the time in the world. There’s a meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office at 2.30 p m, and he’s travelling the day after, so we schedule an early lunch at Wasabi, currently Delhi’s most trendy Japanese restaurant, writes Kanika Datta.
Ever correct, his office calls to say he’ll be ten minutes late so I use the time to read a book on Morimoto, the celeb chef who has “created” the food. Apparently, he likes to experiment with European and other influences. Bery is known to be deeply knowledgeable about food and wine, so I invite him to choose the meal. Having fastidiously specified that I must not prefix his name with the honorific Dr because he didn’t complete his thesis at Princeton, the former World Banker engages in a formidably technical discussion with our server.
An NCAER client once told me that Bery was notably indecisive. The lengthy process of ordering the meal corroborates that. The discussion ricochets between Bento boxes, Teppanyaki, Yakitori and other elegancies before, yes, umm, all right, we will have, er, perhaps, should we?, a prawn tempura for starters and, no, no maybe not with the spicy mayonnaise, what other sauces?... er, d’you think, perhaps, also a sushi platter, provided we could have two of each kind and, do they do Nigiri or…. In the interests of time I suggest we go with the tempura and sushi platter and take a call on whether we wanted more later.
When we resume, we’re talking about how he went up to Oxford to read for a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He gently corrects my ignorant, phonetic pronunciation of his college Magdalen (“it’s ‘maudlin’ — the Cambridge college is pronounced Magdalene”). It was after he won a scholarship to an English boarding school called Oakham — “Rakesh [Mohan, former Reserve Bank of India deputy governor and his predecessor at NCAER] was one year my senior there.”
Indeed, his conversation is casually peppered with the names of contemporaries, many of them giants of economic reform, and he has a close knowledge of their education. Sample: “So I went up in 1967 just as Montek left — having got a congratulatory first to do his Bachelor of Philosophy, which is really a Master’s, at St Anthony’s… and Shankar [Acharya, former Chief Economic Advisor, 1993-2001] had just left for Harvard where he went straight to his PhD….”
We’re served amuse-bouche, inadequate hors d’oeuvres that we ingest without missing a heartbeat, as Bery tells me how the 1966 devaluation almost ended his plans to go up to Oxford. His father, working with Caltech, the oil company that was later nationalised to become Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd, had had to take loans to part-finance his education.
The tempura arrives. Bery remarks on the austere beauty of the dish, which reminds him of “exquisite Japanese craftsmanship” and says the secret to good tempura is getting the temperature of the fat right. He wields the chopsticks with careless dexterity, in sharp contrast to my red-neck clumsiness. “Oh dear, I have done the unpardonable,” he suddenly says. This being mixing soy sauce and pea salt — “you must never mix flavours.” I forebear to tell him I have garnished every prawn with this mixture and enjoyed it thoroughly.
His interest in food was “hardwired” into him; his aunts remember him clipping out recipes even as a small boy. But it was a skill he had to use at Oakham and when he spent his holidays with his older brother (he has three, all of whom went to Doon School) who was in London. “But I really hit my stride in the World Bank when Rakesh and I used to entertain as bachelors and we did a lot of the cooking from Madhur Jaffrey’s first cookbook!”
He does far less cooking now, and his tastes are more western, mostly Italian, “although my wife does tease me that I am the only person she knows who thinks English food is something to be craved”.
The sushi platter is served and we briskly set out mixing the pungent ginger with soy. I ask Bery what he would do now, after his ten-year stint at NCAER. There is still, he says, some “unrequited work” that “tends to go with the territory” such as being a part-time member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council. He’s also on the board of National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) and a member of the National Statistical Commission, a job he describes as “quite demanding”.
But it is his role as Country Advisor for “a new and fairly substantial initiative”, a joint venture between Oxford and London School of Economics called the International Growth Centre (IGC), that sounds the most interesting. Its agenda is to create an opportunity for more demand-driven research. “The notion is that development research is driven by the intellectual interest of the researchers, issues of methodology and so on, but all developing countries – and IGC has offices in south Asia and Africa – need to absorb and customise research to their circumstance so this is a funding and supervisory mechanism that is designed to do that.”
He breaks off to apologise for eating fast, but since all he’s doing is matching me exquisite sushi for sushi, I suggest we order another dish and invite him to choose again. This time the process is shorter but still complex. “Would you like noodles or soup?” he asks. Noodles. “Would you like udon, soban or ramen?” he continues, then kindly explains the differences (it’s mostly in the thickness and the wheat or rice base), but we settle for pork chops.
Talking about IGC’s agenda, Bery muses about the vibrant “think-tank culture” in the US where the presidential system allows academics to become practitioners. Although India does have a tradition of scholar-practitioners – the prime minister, Montek, Vijay Kelkar, Rangarajan, Venu Reddy and so on — it is still “a fairly narrow eye of the needle”.
That triggers some introspection. “As someone who has headed a think tank for ten years we have a lot to answer for this,” he says. “If we had been more vigorous and as clued in as, say, the business press we would have made a difference at the margin. We should have been people writing about how to allocate spectrum instead of just leaving it to some combination of the press and the bureaucracy.”
Our pork chops are served and I use the opportunity to pose what he later describes as a “zinger” — the criticism that many talented economists – like current RBI deputy governor Subir Gokarn (who left for Crisil), Laveesh Bhandari (of Indicus), Ila Patnaik (of NIPFP) – exited during his watch.
“I have several responses to that.” Long pause. Then with many halts to frame his thoughts he explains how the sources of competition became much stronger over the decade. “We’ve lost a couple of senior people to universities, essentially because, frankly, the pressures in a university environment are relatively less whereas NCAER had traditionally been wedded to the project model so it was harder for people to pursue their own kind of research.”
“So what have I tried to do about it?” he asks and then answers, “We have tried to raise a certain amount of endowment funding — but I’ve discovered that this project mode is pretty hard-wired into the system.”
He admits to struggling with the issue of holding on to talent but suggests, “Flip around what you were saying … in its 55 years, a large part of the establishment of applied economic research has gone through NCAER at one time or another and it has created many stars so my hope is that that conveyor belt does not stop….”
We decline dessert and Bery asks how much time is left. Not much so I quickly ask him to name his favourit-est restaurant in the world. As always, the answer is thorough. Not one — but three. One was Sushi Mizutani in Tokyo, which he visited in January this year. Another, to which he and his wife have made repeated trips, is a “rather distinguished restaurant” in Alsace L’Auberge de L’Ill, which enjoys three Michelin stars.
“And third, to show you what a difference service can make to the enjoyment of a meal – friendly, welcoming American style – I would say the Union Square Café on 16th Street in New York. It never disappoints.”
If the deadline for the PMO appointment wasn’t looming, I suspect the list would have been much longer.
