Finest scholar in the trade

Read full article

With the passing away of Thirukodikaval Nilakanta Srinivasan, ‘TN’, the world has lost a true scholar. Intellectually, TN was as formidable as his full name. Personally, he was kind to one and all. He lived his entire life for scholarship —and for a little bit of Carnatic music.

Bangladeshi economist M G Quibria, who studied with me at Princeton, used to describe TN as India’s Paul Samuelson. He opined that like Samuelson, TN had complete mastery of mathematical techniques and wrote simultaneously in a large number of fields including international trade, development economics, public finance and econometrics.

No Jumbled Numbers…

At one level, this was not surprising. Before he did his PhD in economics at Yale, TN had done his BA (Honours) and MA in mathematics, and then received two years of professional training in statistics at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata, from none other than P C Mahalanobis. At Yale, TN wrote his thesis under the direction of Tjalling Koopmans, the 1975 Economics Nobel laureate.

TN returned to India in 1964 and joined the Planning Unit of ISI Delhi to work closely with Pitambar Pant of the Planning Commission. It is here that he came in contact with Jagdish Bhagwati. Over time, the two economists became close friends and collaborators. They went on to co-author numerous highly influential papers in the field of international trade theory. Their joint publications on subjects such as the theory of distortions, non-economic objectives, effective protection, smuggling, transfer paradox, tariff-jumping investment and, most notably, policy rankings to tackle marker failures substantially set the research agenda of my generation of trade economists.

In the opinion of Avinash Dixit of Princeton University, the work TN did with Bhagwati on policy rankings is worthy of a Nobel. Dixit has written that though the Nobel Prize committee has never awarded the prize to someone not worthy of it, it has erred in neglecting a worthy in one case. He goes on to state, “Jagdish Bhagwati, probably jointly with T N Srinivasan, surely deserves one for work on the theory of ranking different policies to tackle economic failures.”

Beginning in the mid-1960s, TN regularly wrote on Indian economic policies till the end. When working at the Planning Unit in the 1960s, he collaborated with economists B S Minhas, C Rangarajan and Pranab Bardhan. He was among the earliest advocates of openness and pro-market reforms in India. His 1975 book with Bhagwati, Foreign Trade Regimes and Economic Development: India, systematically demonstrated the damage that autarkic policies had done. Subsequently, in his 1993 book, also co-authored with Bhagwati, India’s Economic Reforms, he provided a detailed roadmap for reforms many of which were implemented in the following decade.

TN paid special attention to the quality of data. Scholars using poor quality data, whether senior or junior, were uniformly at the receiving end when he commented on their works. At conferences, he regularly questioned inferences drawn from data that were not representative of the population they were supposed to represent.

…or Mumbled Words

In a review of Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen’s book, An Uncertain Glory, Sen receives the same treatment at the hands of TN. In the book, Sen makes certain claims regarding relative life expectancy in India and Bangladesh during 1950-55 using UN estimates. TN points out, however, that while the UN estimate for Bangladesh is derived by back-casting from the age-specific mortality rates of the sample registration system of the 1980s and later, that for India is based on censuses. The two estimates are, thus, non-comparable, invalidating the author’s conclusion.

I first met TN in the summer of 1977 in Washington DC. That year, he had moved from ISI to the World Bank where I was doing a summer internship. I was then working on my PhD thesis in the field of international trade and shared a key chapter from it with him. He was kind enough to read and offer comments on the chapter. The following year, I landed a faculty position at the University of Maryland while he accepted a position at Yale.

As a young scholar, I studied virtually all of TN’s papers in the field of international trade. Eventually, I had the good fortune to co-author a handful of papers and a PhD-level textbook on international trade with him and Bhagwati. Beginning with 2004, I also got to see him every year at the India Policy Forum (IPF) hosted by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) until I joined NITI Aayog.

When at NITI Aayog, I was privileged to consult TN on the work of the Task Force on Improving Employment Data, which I chaired. Though already suffering from Parkinson’s disease by then, TN travelled from Chennai to Delhi to offer his advice. He was his usual self: opposed to cutting any corners and insistent on the highest scientific standards in data-gathering.

I felt lucky to have had the benefit of the advice of the world’s best scholar on the subject and tried to build nearly all of his recommendations into the final report. Sadly, that was my last interaction with TN. Next year, when I rejoin IPF, along with all others, I will badly miss TN and the critical comments that he has so generously offered over the last 15 years.