BR Shenoy - A Prophet Without Honour?

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij6KISXzIGM Duration: 221.8s

Speaker (00:09): One thing you could say about BRS is that he followed his own star. He followed his own opinion. We were sort of brought up with that as children. I mean, he he did not follow what other economists were saying unless it met the test of his own understanding. I mean, it’s a bit like Lord Buddha. Right? He said, do not follow me blindly, but unless it meets the test of your own critical intelligence. So it’s not surprising that he did not follow the existing party. I mean, party didn’t pick him up for public policy because the atmosphere at the time was very difficult to imagine now. Entrepreneurship was a dirty word. Business was a dirty word. Profit was a very dirty word. And the concept of a market was simply not there. The concept of competition and a market. So in those, in the, and and the whole thing was to imitate the Soviet Union and heavy industry and having a central planning mechanism and so on. And one of the things my father used to say is that he didn’t have much respect for the Indian well known economists who were what he called economic lawyers. He said a politician gives them a policy and then they formulate an argument to support that policy. So his early ideas was India is poor, India is unemployed, India needs employment. So therefore, you should invest in areas which generate employment and generate goods and services, in the most efficient way. This seems obvious, but not to the policymakers of the time. And they they just, one of the phrases which you used to describe the Planning Commission were just imitating the gross output index for economic growth and so on. This is, these people support a menu without prices. So yeah. As I said, it wasn’t surprising he was not popular and he continued to be unpopular until his ideas and those of others in the Indian liberal movement had some impact in the form of the Swatantra Party, which is sadly no more, but the idea spread. And then when the time came, without invoking his name, the idea were used in the 1991 reforms, which have been referred to as a second independence of India.