India on the Growth Turnpike--Vijay Kelkar

India on the Growth Turnpike:Essays in honour of Vijay Kelkar --Edited by Sameer Kochhar; Pages 317 ; Price Rs 995/-; Published by Academic Foundation.
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The book under review is a festschrift to Dr.Vijay Kelkar who was the pioneer in dismantling the administrative price for petroleum as also renowned for his fiscal policy reforms initiated through his heading the Task Force for the implementation of the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act and the chairmanship of the Thirteenth Finance Commission. He was the architect of the New Exploration Licensing Policy which put an end to the monopoly of ONGC and national oil companies, introducing an element of competition in this sphere. This led the country to add more reserves in the last ten years than it had in the previous four decades.

The editor of this book , Sameer Kochhar, President of Skoch Development Foundation, a think-tank on digital, social and financial inclusion issues, concedes that this “festschrift” is to commemorate Dr Kelkar being conferred the Skoch Challenger Lifetime Achievement Award 2010.
There are essays by twelve authorities .To summarise a few-
Arvind Panagariya declares that Kelkar was the first among economists to predict India growing at nearly ten per cent. As policy analyst Ajay Shah says in his monograph, a major achievement of Kelkar lies in his work on fiscal reforms which emphasised on how it was important to focus on both revenue/income and expenditure to achieve fiscal consolidation, which would in the long run expand aggregate demand, goad private investment and depress interest rates. Surjit Bhalla examines the impact of the new tax architecture built by Kelkar. Arvind Subramanian analyses the crash of 2008 and the steps to prevent another. S. S. Tarapore, has praised the role of Kelkar and argued that the reform process must continue with fiscal, monetary and external policies being mutually consistent to ensure sustained growth. Ms Indira Rajaraman, pays full credit to Kelkar for having ensured concern for “transparency of the fiscal system” while formulating the recommendations of the Thirteenth Finance Commission.

Vijay Kelkar “is that rare policy economist who can see reforms necessary to promote growth before anyone else, effectively communicate the rationale behind them to policymakers and the wider public, and sometimes even successfully implement them himself.” His work for over three decades has started yielding fruit and this is abundantly clear from the essays in this book.

Even as double-digit growth for India is forecast in the coming years, Kelkar had said in his 2004 K. R. Narayanan Oration in Canberra that thanks to the “painstaking reforms initiated over the last two decades” that spanned the governments of Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, “India is at the threshold of “a golden age of growth with India's democratic framework being a key growth fundamental”.

The book under review, which has a number of tables, a list of the publications of Kelkar is an outstanding compilation of original articles by acknowledged authorities and is useful for economists, planners, political scientists and students alike.

P.P.Ramachandran,
B-2-64,Snehadhara,
Dadabhai Cross Road 3,
Irla, Vile Parle (West),
Mumbai, 400056
3-10-2010