Icrier at 20: Full throttle, in many directions

Rohit Bansal

It started with a phone call 23 years back. The Ford Foundation telephoned the European Community commissioner for development in Brussels, Claude Cheysson, wondering if the EC would want some money to study development co-operation within the Third World. Mr Cheysson passed on the princely Rs 3 lakh on offer to K B Lall in New Delhi, just back from an ambassadorship to Brussels, crediting him with “some interesting and untested ideas”.

Dr Lall, now 86, recounts this as “fortuitous”, because his take from Brussels had been a deep sense of “impasse”. “That in the battle for ideas, developing countries (like India) might secure only peripheral changes. That substantive ideas were going amiss”. One, because the responsibility for India’s cause was split among several ministries. Two, because unlike in the developed world, where inter-ministerial committees and industry and academia had common platforms, “our mechanisms of understanding the world were dispersed”. It was rare to find “deep experience of problems at home, alongside the skill and ability to see what’s happening in the world,” Dr Lall remembers.
Hence Icrier, better known now as the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, was born in August 1981.

There is no doubt that at 20 today, ICRIER is stepping out of its teens, saddled with a greater corpus and more responsibility. And its work has international repute

To his credit, for three years preceding Icrier, Dr Lall did solid groundwork, putting together one of the strongest standing committee’s available at that time: I G Patel, Jagdish Bhagwati, Malcolm Adseshiah, C Rangarajan, Manu Shroff, Fredie A Mehta and a young Montek Ahluwalia.

“We had a dream. That the time had finally come for the end of socialistic domination (in economics),” remembers Charan D Wadhva, founder member and first director, now president of the Centre for Policy Research (CPR).

“In one stroke, we were no longer the pigeon who thought the cat didn’t exist. It was a time to ask searching questions on the impact of international economics on India. Time to question the moth-eaten syllabii of what was being passed off as international economics”.

For Dr Wadhva, back home from a PhD at Yale, ICRIER was India’s answer to the international finance section at Princeton, or a Queen Elizabeth House in the United Kingdom. In the existing framework, our finance ministry would have a V K Ramaswamy or a Manmohan Singh, “but they were often bogged down by fire-fighting and the nitty gritty, and never too keen to express private opinion”. It was a space ICRIER could fill.

All that is easier said. In fact, right since its nascent years, it hasn’t been easy for ICRIER “to marry research which users wanted and would pay for” with “truly big picture research, that didn’t descend to the trivial”.

“I joined unsuspectingly,” Dr Wadhva remembers on money and quality, the DNAs of a research body. “I didn’t know that we (ICRIER) had in the kitty money that’d last us just two months!”. With push and “huge amounts of energies understanding demand rather than doing research,” Dr Wadhva brought the surplus to 14 months of expenses. “It could be done,” he remembers, “because we crossed the stage of being demand-driven to being demand-inducing”.

It’s a reality that has remained unchanged. For Isher Judge Ahluwalia, present director for four years, the key challenge has been two-fold. To keep her coffers flush with funds “so that the best researchers get attracted like bees”, and, alongside, “send a quality signal at a worldwide level”.

Dr Ahluwalia has been successful on the first count. With her network across the corporate world, ICRIER today has heavy duty infotech infrastructure, computers, thanks to IFCI and NR Narayana Murthy, and “celebrity brands” for full-time professors. Notably, Anwarul Hoda, fresh from a deputy director-generalship at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and Shankar N Acharya, on leave from North Block, where he was chief economic advisor.

But are celebrities of any use to an institution given an inherent and high turnovers of researchers? Dr Wadhva thinks they are. “When ICRIER talks to the commerce ministry at the level and currency of a Hoda, they listen that much more readily,” he says, re-inforcing Dr Ahluwalia’s strategy. He also supports Dr Ahluwalia’s ventures outside of traditional definitions of international economics, like her collaboration with Jeffrey Sachs on health economics. “It helps to spread out in the fields of tomorrow,” Dr Wadhva offers.

On her part, Dr Ahluwalia sees ICRIER’s constant inflow (and outflow) of researchers, “our UGC salaries notwithstanding”, as a tribute to “our computers, air-conditioning and a conducive environment”.
ICRIER, she feels, is in line with what chairman I G Patel hired her for, from the CPR, in 1997. “Today, we are apolitical and forward looking. And we are influential in understanding India’s linkage with the world”.

Not everyone sees ICRIER’s high turnovers and diversification as such a good thing. Instead, they fear the institution is getting “diffused” and should “learn to say no to some donors, if only because it is in the fortunate position to do so”.

If she sees a market in areas “outside” of its charter, these well wishers would like Dr Ahluwalia, “to go back to her board and get the charter changed, rather than keep on pursuing hasty diversification”. These academics also suspect “increasing pressure on Ahluwalia to draw the line between what remains ICRIER’s key competitive advantage, i.e., international economic relations, and the tendency of (celebrity) professors and researchers to pursue areas purely within their own interests”.

It’s an argument Dr Ahluwalia contends. Take Dr Acharya. Dr Ahluwalia feels this is a great time for ICRIER to have him on board, “when he is in a mood to read, write and speak out”. The presence of an Acharya helps the researcher, she feels. Take K L Krishna from the Delhi School of Economics. Dr Ahluwalia thinks, “it is a coup” to have him on board as senior consultant. Having Hoda as professor, “in these times of the WTO, heightens our strategy to network and to increase our interaction with policy makers”. Therefore, “we really have caught the brands, at the right time,” she feels.

Amidst these arguments, there is no doubt that at 20 today, ICRIER is stepping out of its teens, saddled with a greater corpus and more responsibility. Its work has international repute. It is a position that pleases founder Lall, for the “impact in the evolution of policy, if not in decision making itself”. Of course, sensitising the government remains a challenge, given, as Dr Lall quips, “the difficulties involved in government to concede that they need external input in the first place”.

For all its goodwill, in coming years there will be times when nothing might help the ICRIER researcher. At such times, he/she may turn to Dr Lall’s parting shot. “What can a research body do, if today’s minister wants a policy tomorrow!”