Clinton finds expatriate Indians make good administrators

United States President Bill Clinton has a soft corner for India. Else, how would you explain all these Indian bureaucrats -- some of them pretty senior ones -- in his administration?

As of now, the Clinton government has 16 Americans whose roots can be traced all the way here. (This, incidentally, is the largest number of such appointees in the US history.) And many of these administrators function in much higher positions than their cousins were accustomed to till now.

Thus goes the list of the seven top-Indians: Dr Rajen Anand, Dr I S I Siddiqui and Sharon Singh, in the agriculture department. David Jhirad and Ram Uppluri, both associated with the energy wing. T Krishnan, in transportation, and Krishna Toolsie, the special assistant to the Civil Rights Commission chairman.

While Siddiqui is the deputy assistant secretary for marketing and regulatory programmes, Anand was promoted this year to the number two position, as the Centre for Nutrition Policy Promotion deputy director. He also serves on the National Committee of Foreign Medical Education and Accreditation board.

Two other Indians were recently appointed to commissions which meet periodically -- Chicago businessman Niranjan Shah (who serves on the Rarry Goldwater Scholarship Foundation) and Kailash Mathur from the south Carolina state university (on the Nutrition Monitoring Advisory Council).

David Jhirad and Ram Uppluri are both in the energy department. The latter is an advisor, and the former a deputy assistant secretary for internationation policy and promotion.

Clinton's another favourite is Dr Tiupvapur Lakshmanan. A presidential appointee, he has been the Bureau of Transportation Statistics director for the past four years.

Now for the merits of these Indians.

Dr Anand, who is currently on leave from the California University, holds a Ph D in physiology, nutrition and biochemistry.

Toolsie, who traces his roots to India via Trinidad and Torago (from where his great-great-grand father migrated as a labourer) joined the Civil Rights Commission in 1988. He was reappointed in 1992.

Dr Lakshmanan has excellent academic credentials and research experience. He was a founder and the executive director of the Centre for Energy and Environmental Studies, Boston university. Author of 10 books and more than 60 research articles, he is a visiting scholar at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, the International Institute for Applied System Analysis, Austria, the Cambridge university, England, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jihrad, who taught physics at Boston, has pioneered innovative and successful approaches to international energy and environmental problems.

Uppluri, an expert on energy and environment, had worked with vice president Al Gore when he was a senator, helping him prepare for the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil. An ex-journalist, he had lost out in the 1994 race to the house of representatives...

Finally, a look at the former prominent Indian appointees. Actually, there were just two -- Dr Arti Prabhakar and Dr Dharmendra Sharma, both presidential appointees who were confirmed by the Senate National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Dr Sharma was the first administrator of the transport department's Research and Special Programme Administration.

UNI