Manu Shroff: A great life has ended

Apart from brilliance, I G Patel had wide acceptability.

Dr Indraprasad Gordhanbhai Patel, IGPatel or IG to many, who passed away on Sunday, was a widely respected economist.

He had a brilliant mind, which was exceptionally lucid and a magnetic personality which drew people from a wide variety of fields to him.

He reached many heights but remained modest and soft-spoken and was generous in his intellectual and other contributions to society.

He is survived by his charming wife, Alaknanda, a great support to him in all his endeavours and their daughter, Rehana, who teaches mathematics at a college in Queens.

IG came from a middle class family in Vadodara, originally from Karamsad, one of the six important villages of Kheda district in Gujarat.

H M Patel hailed from Dharmaj and I have been witness to banter between the two about the rank of the two villages! IG had a brilliant academic career at Vadodara and Cambridge, UK, and, for a brief while, Cambridge, Mass.

He broke many records at Cambridge. Even at that young age, IG showed exceptional ability to argue a case convincingly, an ability which he displayed all through his life.

He had applied for a scholarship for economics to a Tata Foundation, but he was told that it was available only for science subjects.

His response was typical: Who said economics is not a science? He was asked to demonstrate it and wrote an essay on the subject which won him the scholarship.

Armed with a first class MA degree and PhD from Cambridge, IG returned to Vadodara to teach at the Baroda College.

Soon thereafter, he joined the IMF in Washington. His first encounter with economic policy in India was as a Member of the two-men Mission headed by Bernstein.

The Report of the Mission on Economic Development with Stability, believed to have been written largely by IG remains a classic.

In the fifties, we were concerned about inflationary impact of development. The slogan then was development with stability, to be replaced later by growth with social justice.

IG was deeply involved in the pursuit of both the sets and he played a crucial role in the fifties and early sixties in reconciling the conflicts between those who wanted fast growth on the basis of the so-called physical planning and those who were deeply concerned about the financial resource constraint and the prospect of inflation.

IG's skills in making a convincing case were of course important in this; but more than that his transparent sincerity and commitment and personal magnetism were crucial.

Pitamber Pant was from the opposite camp, so to say, for us in the Ministry of Finance. But IG was close to him and had won the respect and affection of Prof.

Mahalanobis. Inevitably, IG became a bridge between Planning Commission and the Ministry of Finance, between physical and financial planning.

IG had joined the Ministry of Finance as a Deputy Economic Adviser in 1954 under Prof J.J Anjaria ( with whom he had a close and affectionate relationship) and became Chief economic Adviser in 1961.

Quite early in his days at the Ministry, senior ICS officials like B.K.Nehru and later S.Bhoothlingam and L.K.Jha took note of him and over time got hooked to him.

He worked with many finance ministers, all of whom respected his advice and became fond of him. In particular, the see-saw of T.T. Krishnamachari and Morarji Desai in the late fifties and early sixties left IG as a constant factor in the Ministry as he was fully acceptable to both.

Indira Gandhi was equally fond of him in the pre-Emergency days. He was IG to all of them.

IG's diplomatic skills and his wonderful capacity of winning over the hearts of people stood the country in good stead in mobilizing external resources for development.

A whole chapter of his life was filled by this very sensitive and not too pleasant a task. He used to quote his father who said, Did you become so well educated only to engage in begging? One of the most poignant essays he wrote in early seventies was on "Aid Fatigue".

He could not be present at the meeting in Williamsburg organized by Barbara Ward and I had to present his paper. Many US economists and officials were present.

Pitamber Pant was also there. The discussion soon turned on IG rather than aid. Why is IG so sad?

Almost all the aid negotiations with IMF, the World Bank and individual countries were conducted by IG or under his advice.

His brilliant presentations at the annual India Consortium Meetings in Paris on India's problems and needs were a treat for the aid bureaucracy.

He spoke from notes and his thoughts ran so fast that as his speech tried to catch up with them, it became difficult for the listeners to keep pace.

The Bank officials sitting opposite would gesture to me to slow him down and I would gently nudge him to no account-indeed to be gently rebuked after the meeting for disturbing him!

IG was a bureaucrat par excellence. Although his sympathies lay elsewhere, he helped put through bank nationalization.

Earlier, he had differences on gold policy and he took leave of absence for a year to teach at the Delhi School of Economics.

In the committed bureaucracy period, he must have felt uncomfortable and he went on to UNDP. During the Janata regime, he returned, but not before completing his term at the UNDP, to be at the helm of Reserve bank.

Retirement took him to academic world, as Director of IIMA and then of LSE, the latter a singular distinction for him and the country.

He never really retired. He continued to serve as Director of State Bank and Chairman of ICRIER. Earlier, he headed the Aga Khan Foundation for Rural Development in India. He continued to be involved in numerous international committees.

IG loved travelling. He loved the good things of life and enjoyed life fully. He was fond of music, partly an influence of Alaknanda, and was quite crazy about cricket.

His many friendships enriched his life. And he gave them more than he took. With all that, he was essentially a very private person.

He was a very humane person who looked after his assistants in office and help at home with exceptional consideration and care.

What was IG's ideology? Frankly, none in the sense of believing in any of the isms. He was a liberal, pragmatic economist. But he was brought up in the Nehruvian mould and while he fully endorsed the liberalisation policies, he remained uncomfortable with extreme marketers.

Something""maybe the poverty and injustice he saw all around""held him back and pushed him at times to interventionist solutions.

He could not bear the hate agenda which led to Gujarat riots and in a strongly worded article-a rare thing for him-condemned the failures of the State Government.

He often moaned about corruption and ineffectual government expenditures but was not averse to deficit financing for worthwhile investments.

The private-public debates bored him. Whatever works should be the right thing to do.

IG rode like a colossus through a whole generation of economic policy making. But he never sought office; nor did he welcome private corporate involvement, except when he felt an obligation to some one he liked and respected.

Thus he was chairman of Hindustan Oil Exploration Company, the first private sector company in this field started as an ideal by the Late H T Parekh.

IG was not a theoretical economist as such. But he had that rare quality of intelligence which helped him make judgments which could be explained ex post in a theoretical framework.

Hence he commanded wide respect from economists of all hue here and abroad. The economist fraternity in India has lost their icon.

(IG wrote Glimpses of Economic Policy""an autobiographical piece and also on his experience with higher education at the LSE and IIMA. Two collections of his essays have also been published.)

When I met him two days before he left for USA late April, he was looking very fit after his illness in November last. But he said this was his last trip abroad; he did not want to undertake long travels thereafter.

Who would have thought that his words would come true in such a tragic way?