Usually, this column is about economic research. But this time I want to write about those who do it.
The primus inter pares amongst them is the National Council of Applied Economic Research. It is celebrating is 50 th anniversary this year.
For the past three years, I have been associated with the Council as the managing editor of its quarterly journal, Margin. That association, sadly, will end on March 31.
My first encounter with the Council was way back in 1968 when, as a college student, I was sent to invite Dr P S Lokanathan, who was then the head, for a talk on the effects of the 1966 devaluation. He declined saying more research had to be done before he could make a pronouncement.
More research there certainly has been - a lot of it. Until recently, some of it used to overflow onto the spacious corridors of the Council whose building, some say, more than compensates for the lack of impact its research has on policy.
The fault, however, does not lie with the research, which, warts and all, is based on primary data. It lies with the government, whose joint secretaries know everything.
As P N Dhar, who set up the Institute of Economic Growth wrote in his autobiography, the only person in government who was interested in the Institute's findings was the clerk in charge of releasing the funds tranches - that too for audit purposes.
Given this attitude to research, it is a veritable miracle that NCAER is celebrating its 50th anniversary, that too without much government support in recent years. Perhaps, the solidity of its building, not to mention the flowery expanse of its lawns, has something to do with it. It is just there.
NCAER has also, by and large, been able to avoid the trap that the late Arun Ghosh used to warn about in the early 1980s. That was when think tanks had begun to spring up in the capital, mostly as a way of providing retired civil servants - the very same chaps who scorned research when they were in service - as way of remaining relevant (or at least giving them the comforting illusion that they were still relevant).
Dr Ghosh warned that research would dance to the tune of the piper. He was right. You only have to look at the amazing uniformity of views amongst think tanks to see why.
NCAER, in my view, avoided that particular pitfall by focusing on its core strength - surveys and data analysis, rather than compulsive policy wonking and, what some see as the same thing, advocacy. Of late, though, it has not been able to leverage its strength to the fullest extent. But the capability exists in a way that it doesn't in other think tanks.
It also managed to foster an attitude amongst its researchers that they were academics. Since most of them had come - and still do - from universities, this may not have been very hard to do. After all, the guiding principle of academics is "leave me alone".
But that it was not actively replaced by the management with the "consultant" mentality is a major triumph. Indeed, that is what makes NCAER one of the few exceptions to Ghosh's fears.
However, that triumph has not been unmixed blessing. Academics, or those who think they are academics, are usually strangers to discipline. Economists at NCAER, as a class, do not form a sub-set of exception.
Therefore, the challenge before NCAER, as it continues to mesh an academic mindset with the exigencies of what its present Director-General Suman Bery calls "contract" research, is to find the optimal combination of the two.
That requires it to recognise something other professional organisations discovered long ago: management should be the job of a group of professional managers, just as it is in hospitals, successful universities and even newspapers.
This is going to be crucial in attracting research funding in the years to come.
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