Financial Express recently did a special feature about 20
interesting people in India's economic reforms. In that, I wrote
this profile of Vijay Kelkar.
Vijay Kelkar's is a fascinating story in Indian public policy. He
started out as an economics Ph.D. and turned himself into a consummate
policymaker. While he did many interesting things in the field of oil
and gas, and as executive director of the IMF, I worked with him in
his fiscal phase.
This involved carrying forward the tax reform agenda of the 1990s,
translating the intent of the FRBM Act into a concrete workplan,
leading the transformation of income tax administration through
innovative institutional arrangements in the form of the Tax
Information Network (where the implementation was contracted out to
NSDL), analysing and championing the Goods and Services Tax (GST) and
leading the 13th Finance Commission.
For most people, the idea of the fiscal reform is exhausting. Fiscal
systems have many moving parts, and suffer from the political economy
problem of entrenched beneficiaries. I used to get astonished at the
way Kelkar, who is 20 years older than me, consistently found the
energy and morale to go back into the fray again and again, chipping
away at solving long-standing problems. This also taught me that while
weary cynicism is a more fashionable pose, progress is only achieved
through the dint of boundless optimism.
Practical people are often dismissive of the world of ideas, but that
is not the Kelkar that I have known. For one thing, he made a point of
reading the current global research in economics on an astonishing
scale. I have been frequently humbled in finding that his knowledge of
the current literature was better than mine. I suspect his years at
the IMF were very useful in tooling him up in modern open economy
macroeconomics, which is often a gap in the knowledge of those who
experienced a closed India in their formative years. Kelkar has always
encouraged me, saying that in an open society, ideas matter, so it was
important to build good ideas, and to push important messages out in
the public domain, even when this makes many people uncomfortable.
After decades of engagement, Kelkar is no longer active in the public
policy work of the New Delhi community. However, he has begun a stint
as chairman of the National Stock Exchange (NSE). Given the immense
importance of the equity market in the Indian economy, and the immense
complexity of ownership and governance of stock exchanges, it is
indeed valuable that a person of his wisdom is performing this public
service.
