The new director general of FICCI Rajiv Kumar tells Forbes India the key lessons he learnt from his last assignment at ICRIER and the importance of nurturing research and human resources
Rajiv Kumar
Age: 59
Designation: Now Director General, FICCI. Previously, Director, Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER)
Career: Member of the G-20 Advisory Group, Ministry of Finance; Director of ICRIER from 2006-10; Chief Economist of Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) from 2004-06.
Education: D.Phil. in Economics from Oxford University; Ph.D. from Lucknow University
Hobbies: Practicing “Sahej” yoga
How was your experience at ICRIER?
I was at ICRIER for four-and-a-half years and my stint there gave me a great satisfaction. The greatest being that by the time I left it was a place humming with not just activity but with energy and ideas of young people. So, my greatest satisfaction came from moving away from a model which sort of said that, and, of necessity, that you get some stars, get some established people and then get them to represent ICRIER or intervene in policy because that’s the think tank model. But that had a problem: Either you were stuck with people who were quite senior, in the sense that they were getting old and so only had their innings to look back on… not necessarily brimming with new ideas, or those brimming with ideas were generally abroad and whom we could generally not afford.
So, out of necessity, what happened was that I got hold of a lot of young people who would have typically done their MAs from Delhi School of Economics or M.Phils from Warwick or LSE [London School of Economics]. They were all in the 24 to 28 age bracket and got motivated about reading and writing and working for policy. This suddenly transformed the place because, with a little bit of guidance from me and some of the senior colleagues, they started churning out a lot of material that, although not path-breaking, was enough for the policy maker to take cognizance of. For example, the report on retail was primarily done by two people, both M.Phils, led by a senior person. Now you hear the retail report being quoted extensively in the white paper introduced by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion.
By the time I left, we had research staff of close to 50 people, of which 18 were Ph.Ds. There too I was lucky to get hold of relatively younger people, on deputation from JNU, IMI and IMF who gave ICRIER its dynamism.
Did you have any plan in mind about ICRIER when you started your stint there?
Basically, I had three things in mind when I joined ICRIER. One, I was convinced and am convinced that you need think tanks in the country, separate from research departments of universities, how ever good they might be. I am a believer in the US model rather than the European or Japanese models.
Think tanks are intermediaries between the academic world and the policy world and also a co-ordinator of opinion makers such as journalists, academics, industry representatives and policy makers.
Two: The conviction that it’s all about human resources. That if I have to do anything at all then it is to attract good human resources.
Three: I am not in the business of producing frontline ideas but I am in the business of doing rigorous research that is policy oriented. Herein lies a very important distinction.
Quite often people who are into research think it is not their concern if it is relevant for policy or not. Those who are into influencing policy think that rigorous is waste of time. In the sense that you already know whatever you had to know. So, “the knowledge is there, it is just a matter of packaging it”. I don’t believe in that. I feel good policy comes out of good research. Like the two-year project we did for the MEA [Ministry of External Affairs] on how to define national interest and how to reconcile foreign policy with it. We had 26 papers written on it. From there come these three charts that are there in the book [the ICRIER report on India’s National Interest] that, I think for the first time, conceptually clarified the idea of national interest in terms of security, economic prosperity and global public goods. Then we broke them up after our discussions with all the experts. And then, you get a very focussed and detailed idea of national interest.
It had greatly helped that chairperson Dr Isher Judge Ahluwalia insisted I write a medium term strategy for ICRIER almost at the beginning of my term. It took me two years because the first was spent fire fighting, getting things together and getting ICRIER off the ground.
The medium term strategy helped a lot since we had to define our vision and scope, be clear on our mandate and I think that medium term strategy is still valid. And we changed some of the things around in ICRIER. For example, we added a new thrust area ‘environment’. We activated an area that had never been worked up on — the strategic aspects of international relations.
So, long story short, yes, I had some ideas but these evolved while I learnt on the job.
Five years ago, think tanks were not perhaps covered as extensively as they are today. What do you have to say about the space of think tanks in India?
We are going through very tough times and that is simply because — and this is ironical and paradoxical — there is shortage of human resources. We simply don’t have that. And one of the battles that I have not been completely successful in fighting is the remuneration that you are going to pay our human resources and the quasi-academic world.
Now the Sixth Pay Commission has done a very good job, but my own view on the matter is that we need to go much further. We are pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as human resources are concerned. We are competing in the same pool as the industry, the media, banking and other sectors. They all are attracting the same talent, and are all willing to pay more than think tanks. Plus, all these other sectors are very willing to take really raw hands and train them on the job. We, in the think tank world, actually need a mix of the two. We need some guys who are well trained and who can then mentor others. I needed eight professors who were up to scratch in techniques, concepts, experience and writing and then they could build the team. But I was never able to fill all the slots.
Is it a brand issue?