Farewell the chairman

Ashok Gulati revitalised a sleepy wing of the government

The Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) has been transformed in recent years from a mundane wing of the agriculture ministry advising on crop prices to a proactive think tank on grain pricing, procurement, stockholding and trade policies. The credit for this goes to its chairman, Ashok Gulati, whose three-year term ends on February 28. Unlike most previous heads of this body, who came from the public-funded academic or research institutions and were well versed with bureaucratic ways of functioning, Dr Gulati had worked mostly with non-governmental domestic and international organisations free of stifling administrative constraints. He seemed to have carried the same work culture and unrestrained academic freedom to the CACP. This body has, as a result, turned into a candid - albeit constructive - critic of the government's policies and a vocal advocate of free trade. Its price policy recommendations invariably go beyond suggesting minimum support prices (MSPs) to pinpointing the lacunae in marketing and grain management policies and outlining the needed corrective action.

Under Dr Gulati, the CACP has become transparent. Its output, including price policy reports, is in the public domain. Equally noteworthy is the introduction of a novel practice of putting out non-official discussion papers for public debate on critical policy issues. It is, of course, a different matter that much of the CACP's sane counsel goes unheeded. Though in the initial phase of his tenure Dr Gulati recommended hefty increases in the MSPs of rice and wheat along with those for other crops, he stopped doing so once the necessary price correction was achieved. He, however, continued to recommend substantial annual increases in the MSPs of non-cereal crops to correct the imbalance in the cropping pattern that had tilted in favour of cereals that had accumulated huge surplus stocks. In this connection, he disapproved of state governments' tendency to offer bonuses on top of the MSP to increase cereal procurement. He also disparaged high state levies on grain marketing, which, even while swelling the state treasuries, pushed up food costs for consumers. The latest CACP report on the 2014-15 rabi marketing season beginning from April, unsurprisingly, finds fault with the policy of open-ended procurement, excessive stockholding and market-distorting curbs on farm exports, apart from pushing fertiliser pricing reforms. The most significant among nearly a dozen discussion papers brought out by the CACP was the one on the national food security law. It argued that the massive grain procurement required to implement it would drive the private trade out of agricultural market and keep staple cereal prices high. The welfare impact of the law would be partly nullified, it said, since beneficiaries would still need to meet a sizable part of their food needs from the open market at higher prices.

A major point of interest when Dr Gulati became CACP chairman was whether, like most other non-bureaucrats appointed to high government posts, he would also succumb to a bureaucratic mode of functioning - or whether he would manage to positively influence the system of policymaking. However, none of this seems to have happened. Ashok Gulati has not changed, but, regrettably, the system hasn't either.