 "Lunch with BS: Ajay Mathur")
India International Centre does not claim to offer haute cuisine but a meal there guarantees honest-to-goodness fare. So when Ajay Mathur suggests it for this lunch, I agree on the understanding that he, the member, would present Business Standard with the bill.
The Annexe dining room is a good choice because it eschews the loud musak that restaurants consider obligatory nowadays, making conversation exhausting. The quietude may have something to do with IIC’s famed vintage clientele: it’s a fair bet that Mathur and I, in our fifties, are the youngest diners there.
Neither of us consults the menu; unchanged for decades, we know it by heart; Mulligatawny soup, the quintessentially Anglo-Indian lentil soup, garlic toast to go with it, grilled chicken for him, roast lamb with mint sauce for me. My guest is one of India’s most respected experts and former negotiator on climate change, and currently Director General of the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE), the power ministry agency that’s done robust work in developing energy efficiency programmes.
Preliminary research and talks with people fail to throw up even half a controversial fact about him. But he’s about to take up an uber-controversial assignment as Director-General of climate think tank Teri after the high-profile Rajendra Pachauri was made to step down following a sexual harassment charge. I wonder how Mathur, so affable it is easy to underestimate him, will cope with a high-voltage situation.
His answers are to the point. He has put in his papers and if he works the full 90-day notice period, he’ll be at Teri after October 21. And no, he’s not established any formal links. But Pachauri is creating ructions by coming to the office and travelling overseas on Teri work, I say. He ignores the transparently provocative question, merely adding that he didn’t want to create any conflict of interest.
It’s uncomfortable territory so I ask him instead about his unusual personal history as a technocrat who straddled non-profit, private and public sectors: Suzlon, the World Bank, the government and now back where he started in Teri, the independent non-profit created by a corpus from the Tata group. Considering most engineers – he graduated from the University of Roorkie, now an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) -- would have headed for multinational jobs, why did he choose a non-profit of all things?
It was the result of an admirably focused ambition. “After my engineering degree I was clear I wanted to work in energy. That’s why I did my masters and PhD from University of Illinois in hard-core engineering,” he replies as the soup is served with toast liberally spread with garlic and butter.
“I realised is that when it comes to research, you have to focus on an area of choice. Also, the outputs of research, whether commercialised or not, depend on the environment and that has two parts; the business part and the policy part. I found myself increasingly interested in policy and the only game in town in India then was Teri.”
So a right-time right-place decision? “Absolutely! The first meetings on climate change took place in the mid-eighties with the Montreal Protocol. In 1988, Teri organised an international meeting on climate change, the first of its kind in India. All the world’s leaders attended, both on the science side and those who started thinking of the impact on energy systems. It was an early introduction to issues that would evolve.”
Later, after a year-long interlude with the World Bank in Washington working with the climate change team for the Montreal Protocol, Mathur joined Suzlon, one of the early Indian entrants in wind power, as President. What made him change?
He squeezes lime on the soup before answering thoughtfully. “In the World Bank we were pioneering the climate change instruments – like the Prototype Carbon Fund, which would buy carbon emission reductions. The challenge was how to get this market to work. We were also supporting countries in various projects from the point of view of climate change impact and adaptation. It struck me that the action will be in the private sector, so when Suzlon said it was interested in these issues, I kind of jumped.”
Soup over, the main course is served, succulent slices of lamb in a gravy reduction, accompanied by boiled vegetables and roast potatoes. The chicken looks picture-book perfect so when Mathur offers me a piece I readily accept before asking what surprised him most about the private sector – pleasantly or unpleasantly.
Risk assessment, he replies promptly. “For example, a gearbox maker was up for sale and they decided to buy it. I said, it doesn’t make sense because our own demand is much less than their capacities; they said, wind energy is growing, and everybody needs gearboxes, so it makes sense to get into it. So while I am wondering whether you can pay the interest next year, they’re looking much ahead. In a growth industry your strategy has to be very different from an industry that is more or less constant -- and my education, largely text-book based, was based on static industries!”
His second learning was managing technology. “Early on the company realised that innovation occurs when there are many people facing rewards for innovation. This was happening in north Europe so they bought the technology development arm of a German company that was going out of business and that company kept producing new models for India. So they had start-of-the art knowledge but the machines were produced in India where costs were lower. So different parts of the supply chain of technology follow different business models.”
The BEE opportunity came soon after. “The stars seemed aligned. We had just had an energy conservation Act passed and needed to build something from scratch, which I enjoy doing.”
By now I realise Mathur is too shrewd to be relying on improbabilities like stellar alignments. His description of getting things done in government is instructive, and his explanation of the intricacies of climate change a master class (too long to be reproduced here). He’s also terrific at avoiding controversy without seeming to. I ask him about Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian recent note on India’s negotiating position ahead of the climate change talks in Paris this December. In it, Subramanian had said India should distance itself from developing countries and stop insisting that rich countries finance poor countries to fight climate change.
Mathur provides such an earnestly thorough answer that it takes me a while to realise it is another way of saying the CEA’s contentions are ill-advised, to put it politely. Here it is in full. “At the end of the day we are all in these negotiations for our national interest and the G77 is not a homogenous group so you try to find position where you can forge a coalition with which we can go ahead. It affects all of us. Then we have to move towards strategies that carry the entire world.”
As for relying on funds from developed countries, “I believe that they are necessary for <i> accelerated <p> action. That means we will continue to invest in energy efficiency, renewables, afforestation, water management, and other climate-related actions based on budgetary resources and commercial resources. But both of these have limits.
“There are budgetary provisions needed for health, education, defence and so on, and enhanced investments in climate-related activities would always need to be traded off against investments in those other sectors. On the commercial side, the cost of capital in India and the willingness and ability of consumers to pay for energy determine the level of investment that can go into these sectors. International resources will be needed to accelerate action beyond that which is determined by budgetary and commercial constraints.”
Later he adds peaceably: “At least Arvind has gone ahead and said something different.”
While I mentally marvel at the chicken done just so, we discuss his early encounters in government – the green note sheet that accompanies every file, for instance, and the multiple security and vigilance clearances need before he joined. “It’s done not just to get in but also to get out. Because I had been in Washington, someone from the embassy there actually went to the address where I lived – they do their job!”
We demonstrate our knowledge of the IIC menu by ordering dessert without consulting it -- caramel custard for him, fig and honey ice cream for me – as I return to his upcoming job at Teri. The controversy is not something he bargained for, he admits, but he approaches the issue with characteristic non-adversarial diligence. “It has opened my eyes to an area to which I must confess I had not paid as much attention. So I spent time reading the law, finding out what is required, and I see that these are sensible things to make the workplace comfortable. I would like everybody to come to work excited, not feeling intimidated for any reason -- this or any other.”
He also has a clear agenda for Teri. “I look on Teri as an institution for change. That means it should be able to do what it takes for people to adopt more energy efficient products, renewables or use water in a more responsible manner. For example, I decide that the reason renewables are not used is that there are not good enough solar panels. Then Teri should do the research to develop better solar panels.”
Teri is not Mathur’s only challenge going forward; he’s about to welcome a Bengali son-in-law, fiancé to his daughter studying in the US, and is working hard at pronouncing names correctly (he’s almost there). Surprisingly, neither his older daughter, nor the younger, now working in Kochi, have followed their parents into engineering -- Mathur’s wife is Geetam Tiwari, a noted professor of transport planning at IIT Delhi.
We’re deep in conversation about his work at BEE and the prospects for Paris (he’s optimistic), way over the one-hour he’d allotted, when he receives a text message reminding him of a meeting at the power ministry, so we wind up quickly noting with approval that yet again, IIC has stepped up to the plate.
