Dressed in a casual T-shirt and beige pants, Dr Rajiv Kumar plants his feet squarely on the centre table in his cosy living room before launching into an account of his life.

Elevated on Monday to the post of FICCI's Secretary-General, Dr Kumar says he is like a rolling stone and it is hard to bracket him in any one category.

He cocks an eyebrow at me and asks, “Do you know I was a Maoist in college?”

He claims to have the penchant for doing the most unfashionable of things. “In 1968-69, the entire rage was to do an IAS. I was studying on scholarship money in New Delhi's elite Modern School, Barakhamba Road. In 1971, I ran away from St. Stephens to follow Charu Babu's (Charu Majumdar, the intellectual leader of the CPI-ML) call. It was the time of the Bihar famine, Vietnam War, and I was inspired,” he reminisces.

Around 20 of them landed in Laxmipur and worked as labourers for four months. But somewhere down the line, the magic broke and Mr Kumar returned to Lucknow to his parents. “It saved me in a way, for as soon as I left, a few of my friends were arrested.” In Lucknow, he rebuilt his career and completed his Bachelors, Masters and with the help of an INLACS scholarship secured a seat for himself in Oxford where he did his D.Phil. in Economics

But though he had left the Marxist movement physically, it took him a while to mentally distance from its philosophy. Today, he cites Pol Pot's atrocity in Cambodia and reading a Picador publication Secret Life of Plants as occurrences that finally made his break with Marxism complete.

“Marxism is dialectical materialism and it denies spirits and nature. But how can that be? This book was saying there is life in plants and you can communicate with them. That is when I realised that there were things like spiritualism and nationalism. Mind you, I entered Maoism as a means of saving the nation too.”

He then joined the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) in 1982, and worked there till 1989. In 2007, he returned as Director and Chief Executive at ICRIER.

He has worked with Dr Manmohan Singh and Dr Shankar Acharya, who was the Chief Economic Advisor in the 1990s.

On liberalisation, he says crony capitalism and tax evasion cannot be permitted and Government has to have an arm's length regulatory mechanism to oversee matters.

Reducing poverty is not the same thing as eliminating inequalities, he says. According to him, the best form of poverty reduction is not to dole out money transfers but to create real employment. “This will for example mean, depreciating your currency, increasing your exports, meaning exporting embodied labour.”

Speaking in favour of inheritance tax, he said it would promote philanthropy as it is doing abroad. The wage differential between the top manager and the peon in countries such as Japan are 1:18 while in India, it would be in hundreds. This can be and should be reduced, he says.

At his new role in FICCI, Dr Kumar is going to re-emphasise its role in reform interventions. The nine-point agenda under him would focus on - Expanding share of manufacturing in the economy, higher education and health, agriculture — yields, supply chains, market impediments, water management and conservation, employment generation, environment and green urbanisation, governance reforms, domestic market integration — focus on GST, ease of doing business — focus on state and on modernisation of retail trade and improving financial intermediation.

When asked if Dr Kumar would join politics at a later date, he said, “I don't think I can handle it. But who knows?”

Related Topics