Brookings India chief kicks off India energy crisis research

A research initiative to find solutions for the energy crisis facing India has been launched by the chairman of Brookings India, one of the country's leading policy think tanks.
Vikram Singh Mehta, who stepped down as Shell India chairman last October, and currently heads Brookings India, is here as part of an annual fellowship programme run by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and King's College London's India Institute.
"I plan to work on energy, the subject I am most familiar with, and take off from the point that the energy situation in India is dire. There is a crisis and that will only get worse if we don't address the fundamentals of demand-supply and environment," said Mehta, a former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer who has served as an economic adviser to the Indian government in the past.

"FICCI and King's India Institute have to be commended for this fellowship. It provides a fantastic platform for people at the cross-section of policy and research to come and work on issues of practical consequence to the policy-maker," he added.
While in London over the next few months, the businessman-turned-academic will be meeting officials from the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change (DEC), Foreign Office and Treasury to see where lessons can be learnt and if certain British energy models can be replicated in India.
FICCI will then take his final research paper for discussions at an Indian government level.

"The overarching message will be that we don't have to be radical when looking at implementation. My focus will be on incremental rather than any radical change. If we can come up with practical ways of changing structures, the political system will be more than willing to change things," Mehta said.

"The aim is to get the political economy of energy on a policy path-way that eventually leads to the shifting of the needle of policy by a few degrees," explained Mehta, a regular expert columnist on the subject of energy who also serves on the boards of major Indian conglomerates such as Mahindra & Mahindra, Vodafone India Limited, Larsen & Toubro and Colgate Palmolive India Limited.

His interest in aligning with policy issues also links up with his work as the head of Brookings India.
"The focus essentially is to do research on a range of subjects that are of the highest quality and, by virtue of the quality of the research, to have an impact on policy," said Mehta, an economics graduate from Oxford University.
The FICCI and King's India Institute fellowship is in its second year and had hosted Indian career diplomat Shyam Saran last year.