In 1964, when Mike Smith brought the MCC team to India, Bapu Nadkarni went down in bowling history for delivering 186 balls of which 162 were dot balls. Of these 31 overs, 27 were maidens. The English batsmen were done in by the way the left-arm spinner pegged away at the same spot on a dead wicket.
I recount this episode because, in many ways, Savak Sohrab Tarapore is to monetary economics and macroeconomists what Bapu Nadkarni, or Rameshchandra Gangaram Nadkarni to give him his full name, was to bowlers - unfussy, clear, consistent and focused on the target in a measure that is hard to replicate.
If Mr Nadkarni was the man to whom the captain threw the ball when he needed to keep down the runs (his economy rate was just 1.67 runs per over in his Test career), it is to Mr Tarapore we must turn to keep inflation down, because inflation is to Mr Tarapore what Ravana was to Ram or what Narendra Modi is to the Congress party - it has to be vanquished at all costs.
While he was at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) - he retired as deputy governor after almost 40 years there, having joined in 1961 as research officer - he helped shape monetary policy with that single objective in mind. For 17-odd years after his retirement in September 1996, he has written in newspapers and spoken at seminars indefatigably and the undertow has always been down with inflation.
Since 1996, he has chaired several important committees of the RBI, including the two all-important ones of how to make the rupee fully convertible (incidentally, the five-member committee recommended a three-year time frame for complete convertibility by 1999-2000). His disapproval or approval has been one of the invisible benchmarks against which the past three governors have measured the success of their policies.
Wise words
These two volumes, like the more than half a dozen he has published since 2000, are a compilation of his articles. Their value lies not merely in their content, which is wonderfully precise, but also in the fact that they provide future historians of the Indian economy with a contemporary verdict by a master who has no intellectual or other agendas.
The 136 short essays contained in these two volumes cover a wide range of issues in monetary policy, banking, regulation and consumer issues, of which financial inclusion, gold and deposit rates are perhaps the most important. Each one tells you why a certain initiative is right or wrong and what must be done about it. Needless to say, they are liberally sprinkled with anecdotes.
Ideally, each sub-topic should form the core of the undergraduate syllabus in macroeconomics around which discussion groups are organised in the way they are in MBA courses. In short, these essays should be compulsory reading for undergraduates - and, dare I say it, leader writers and other commentators on the economy in newspapers.
The second of the two volumes is the more current one; in it, Mr Tarapore has taken on the government in an uncharacteristically forthright manner. The source of his anger is the finance ministry's inclination to reduce the RBI's role in the financial sector so that politicians, bureaucrats and other grinders of diverse axes may control it.
Missing wisdom
If there is one thing that is missing in these two volumes, it is what could be called an "overall assessment" of monetary policy and theory since 1991. Such a chapter would have both improved the perspective of future readers and provided the intellectual context.
It is true that the RBI often only reacts or responds either to the government's fiscal policies or to the world's uncertainties and, further, that Mr Tarapore himself is also reacting. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that future readers have no sense of the environment of the times or context when particular policies were undertaken.
One final suggestion to the author: he should embark on an autobiography for which he now has most of the material. It only needs to be filled out with personal recollections to make it a fascinating read.
A COMMENTARY ON INDIA'S FINANCIAL POLICIES
S S Tarapore
Academic Foundation
334 pages; Rs 995
INTERPRETING FINANCIAL POLICIES FOR THE COMMON PERSON
S S Tarapore
LexisNexis
190 pages; Rs 245
