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The 3rd C.D. Deshmukh Memorial Lecture 2015

Dr David M. Malone, UN Under-Secretary-General and the Rector of United Nations University delivered NCAER’s C D Deshmukh Memorial Lecture on “From MDGs to Sustainable Development Goals: Opportunities and Pitfalls” in New Delhi on February 9, 2015.

The lecture is the third in the series of the C.D. Deshmukh Memorial Lectures, instituted by NCAER in memory of one of India’s most eminent economists and a founding father of NCAER.  Previous lectures in this series have been given by Kaushik Basu in 2013 and Arvind Panagariya in 2014.

The UN is working with governments, civil society and other partners to build on the momentum generated by the MDGs and carry forward the ambitious, post-2015 sustainable development agenda, to be adopted by UN Member States at the Special Summit on Sustainable Development in September 2015. In this lecture, Dr Malone outlined some of the salient features of the SDG process to date and the remaining hurdles to be overcome.

 

Dr Malone discussed the major shifts changes that have taken place globally since the original Millennium Development Goals were formulated. The developing world has been growing rapidly since the early 2000s, particularly Asia and Africa, with a number of major economies emerging as globally significant, including India and China.  Concerns over risks arising from climate change have escalated dramatically, and considerations of quality of social services rather than just the numbers of those served have increasingly risen on the agenda.   Dr. Malone remarked that unlike MDGs, SDGs are going to be applied to developing and developed countries both, which is a remarkable shift in perspective. Malone highlighted the importance of issues of quality by providing the example of the MDG goal number two on universal primary education, comparing it with the goal of equitable, lifelong and quality education as espoused by SDG goal number four.

Speaking on the occasion, Mr Nitin Desai, former UN Under-Secretary-General commented, “The difference between MDGs and SDGs is that though the MDGs came out as an afterthought, they were the result of a rich political process among UN member countries that preceded their announcement. With the SDGs, there is going to be less room for negotiating numbers.” Dr. Desai also cautioned about putting in too much faith in the target-oriented approach and looking at targets as the main principles of organizing the developmental efforts. He said that reconciling quantity with quality will be a major policy challenge.

About Dr David M. Malone is the Rector of United Nations University and Under-Secretary-General of the U.N. Prior to joining the United Nations University in March 2013, Dr David Malone served as President of Canada’s International Development Research Centre, a funding agency that supports policy-relevant research in the developing world. A world renowned expert on international affairs as well as a career diplomat, Dr Malone is also the former president of the International Peace Institute. He served as Canada’s High Commissioner to India, and non-resident Ambassador to Bhutan and Nepal, from 2006–2008. Malone has published extensively on peace and security issues. His most recent books include Nepal in Transition: From People’s War to Fragile Peace (as co-editor; 2012, Cambridge University Press) and Does the Elephant Dance? Contemporary Indian Foreign Policy (2011, Oxford University Press). Malone has also held research posts at the Economic Studies Program, Brookings Institution; Massey College, University of Toronto; and Carleton University. He holds an MPA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a DPhil in International Relations from Oxford University.

About Mr Nitin Desai is one of India’s best-known economists and international civil servants, with an illustrious career with the Government of India and the United Nations. Currently a Distinguished Fellow at TERI, he was UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs from 1992 to 2003, and earlier the Secretary and Chief Economic Adviser in India. He served as Deputy Secretary-General of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development. After retiring, Desai continued his association with the UN as a Special Adviser to the UN Secretary General for Internet Governance and chaired the UN’s Working Group on Internet Governance. Earlier, Desai has served as a Special Economic Adviser to the Brundtland Commission on environment and development. Desai has been part of several committees of the Government of India. Desai is an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics and Political Science and was elected Chair of the Oxfam International Board of Trustees in 2012. He writes a monthly column for the Indian financial daily, The Business Standard.

NCAER instituted the C. D. Deshmukh Memorial Lecture in January 2013 in memory of one of India’s most eminent economists and a founding father of NCAER.  Sir Chintaman Dwarakanath Deshmukh was the first Indian to be appointed Governor of the Reserve Bank of India in 1943 and was part of the official Indian delegation to the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference that led to the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He served as the Union Finance Minister during 1950 to 1956 under Nehru and was a founding member of NCAER’s first Governing Body. He later served as Chairman of the University Grants Commission and Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University, during which time he also founded the India International Centre.  He was honoured by the President of India with the Padma Vibhushan in 1975.  NCAER is privileged to honour the memory of C. D. Deshmukh as part of its own legacy.

Previous C.D. Deshmukh Memorial Lectures:

2014: A Reform Agenda for India’s New Government by Professor Arvind Panagariya

2013: Grassroots Welfare Schemes and Macroeconomic Choices: India’s Dilemmas by Professor Kaushik Basu

NCAER-PRI Delhi Dialogue “Japan Makes in India: Opportunities and Challenges”

Experts from the Japanese and Indian Governments, research think-tanks and the Indian and Japanese corporate sector met for a dialogue focusing on the opportunities and challenges for Japanese foreign direct investment into India. The first Delhi Dialogue, jointly organized by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the Policy Research Institute (PRI) of the Japanese Ministry of Finance, was held at Hotel Lalit in New Delhi.  NCAER and PRI signed a three-year Memorandum of Intent in January 2015 for joint work and greater collaboration in enhancing economic relation between Japan and India and to explore domestic economic policies and their implementation.<br>
This Delhi Dialogue was extremely timely, coming on the heels of the “Make in India” campaign launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in October 2014 and his visit to Japan last year. The percentage of Japanese companies coming to India for business and investment has gone up by 15% in the past year. India and Japan have set ambitious goals.  The Special Strategic and Global Partnership between India and Japan expects a 3.5 trillion yen jump in investment financing from public and private sources and a doubling of the number of Japanese companies in India within the next five years. Many have heralded this as a special moment in the development of India’s relationship with Japan.<br>
In this Dialogue, discussions were held to analyse the change and challenges in Indian investment climate with special attention to taxation, land, labour and infrastructure access issues. In the opening session on Development Challenges: India and Japan, Dr Shekhar Shah, Director-General, NCAER welcomed the Japanese participants, noting that this was the start of an exciting and fruitful association between the policy research communities in India and Japan represented by NCAER and PRI. Mr Daikichi Momma, President, PRI, talking about the recent highly positive developments in Indo-Japan relations expressed the hope that the association between PRI and NCAER would set the stage for influential work and productive discussions that would contribute to the goals set by the Special Strategic and Global Partnership between India and Japan.<br>
In the opening session, Mr Rajat Nag, Distinguished Fellow at NCAER and until recently the Managing Director-General of the Asian Development Bank, drew attention to the immense demographic challenges that India (with its large and growing, young population) and Japan (with its falling fertility and aging population) face and the opportunities that it creates.  Mr Sanjaya Baru of the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies and former Media Advisor to the Indian Prime Minister shared his view that over time the economic and strategic potential for a Japan-India relationship could be even greater than for the Japan-US relationship.<br>
Senior officials from Indian Government, including Shri Amitabh Kant, Secretary, Department of Industrial Promotion and Policy, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Shri Ajay Tyagi, Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Finance, and Shri K.P Krishnan, Additional Secretary, Department of Land Resources in the Ministry of Rural Development all spoke at the Delhi Dialogue focusing on the policy reforms that are underway to improve the ease of doing business in India.  Mr Rajiv Lall, Executive Chairman of IDFC Ltd, Mr Roopen Roy, President of the Indian Chamber of Commerce and MD-Consulting, Deloitte, Touche, Tohmatsu, representatives of JETRO and JBIC, and senior company officials from a number of Japanese companies including Maruti-Suziki, Sojitz India, Kawasaki, and others all spoke at the first Delhi Dialogue.<br>
The 2015 Delhi Dialogue is the first of a series of such dialogues between NCAER and PRI. Earlier in the year NCAER Director-General Dr Shekhar Shah gave a workshop at PRI in Tokyo titled “Modinomics meets Abenomics: Will Japan make more in India?” to a large audience of influential policymakers and analysts.<br>

NCAER and the Policy Research Institute, Ministry of Finance, Tokyo sign a three-year Memorandum of Intent

Dr Shekhar Shah, Director General, NCAER and Mr Daikichi Momma, President, PRI signed a three-year Memorandum of Intent for joint work and greater collaboration between the two institutions at a ceremony held at PRI on January 21, 2015. Also present on the occasion were Mr Amit Kumar, Deputy Chief of Mission, Embassy of India, Mr Osamu Tanaka, Executive Vice President, PRI, Mr Nobuyuki Uda, Director-General, Research, PRI and other senior PRI staff.

The larger purpose of the MOI is to promote and deepen economic relations between Japan andIndia. The Special Strategic and Global Partnership between India and Japan expects a 3.5 trillion yen jump in investment financing from public and private sources and a doubling of the number of Japanese companies in India within the next five years.  The Japanese Foreign Minister Mr Fumio Kishida, who was in New Delhi earlier in the week, had said in his public Policy Speech on January 18th  that “Under ‘Abenomics’, the Government of Japan supports the overseas advancement of Japanese enterprises, while India has been strengthening its manufacturing industry by attracting investment under ‘Modinomics’…. Japan will contribute to the “Make in India” initiative led by Prime Minister Modi so as to support India in becoming a base of economic growth for the Indo-Pacific region, and ultimately of the world.”

The MOI aims at analysing opportunities for enhancing economic relations between Japan and India focusing on the investment climate and exploring domestic economic policies and their implementation for Japan and India. NCAER and PRI will promote joint research activities in these areas, facilitate exchange of researchers, and cooperate to organise research conferences on issues of common interest in Japan and in India.

The MOI signing ceremony was followed by an India Workshop at PRI at which Shekhar Shah spoke on “Modinomics meets Abenomics: Will Japan Make More in India.” The lecture was moderated by Professor Shujiro Urata, Professor, Waseda University, Tokyo, and attended by some 35 participants. These included experts from the Japanese Government, research institutes, think-tanks, academia, and the press.  After his talk, there was a lively and engaged Q&A with the participants.

This PRI India workshop in Tokyo will be followed by the first of an annual series of Delhi Dialogues in New Delhi on February 6, 2015.

The 16th Annual Neemrana Conference

Neemrana is the most prestigious forum in India for some of the best US scholars associated with NBER to come together with Indian policymakers and policy analysts from the public and private sectors.  For 2014 conference, NCAER brought together a varied and exciting set of Indian participants to engage with our visiting NBER researchers on issues of common policy interest dealing with Indian, US, and global economic developments. A stimulating programme rich both in its depth and breadth was put together for the conference. This included a keynote address by one of India’s most prominent contemporary policymakers.

For now 16 years (1999-2014), the Neemrana Conference remains an enduring partnership that NCAER and NBER started in 1999. NCAER and NBER invited ICRIER to join this partnership in 2008. The impressive list of Indian and overseas participants over the past 15 years at Neemrana suggests the diversity and depth of people who have come—policymakers, politicians, regulators, scholars, corporate leaders,  and journalists—and contributed to its success. The important conversations at Neemrana, both in the conference and over dinner and breakfasts have led to an impressive sharing of experience, evidence, and knowledge over the years as conference participants have grappled with policy challenges in India and in the US against the backdrop of a rapidly changing global economy and the shifting global economic order.

Neemrana has covered topics that have inevitably reflected the major economic policy concerns of the day for India, from growth and equity to inflation to infrastructure to the environment to education to social programs to labour markets and India’s demographics.  Neemrana has also allowed NBER fellows to both engage with these problems but also bring to bear their policy experience and current research on these topics. And now and then it has anticipated problems that India may face based on the US experience. The informal, off-the-record conversations around these topics remain the hallmark of Neemrana.

Roundtable discussion on Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act

This roundtable organised by NCAER presented some of the results from India Human Development Survey (IHDS), a unique panel survey carried out by NCAER in collaboration with University of Maryland. First round of this survey of over 41,000 households was conducted in 2004-5, just before NREGA was implemented. The second round conducted in 2011-12 resurveyed the same households, allowing us to explore household participation in MGNREGA as well as changes in household conditions following implementation of the act. Some of early results were discussed at this roundtable along with the strategies for future research to ensure that the research is responsive to current policy needs.

Dr Sonal Desai, Senior Fellow at NCAER and Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland while presenting some of their initial findings from the research explained that the results from the India Human Development Surveys suggest that restricting MGNREGA to only the 200 poorest districts is likely to be ineffective—and that it may be better to target households, the reasons being :

A greater proportion 69% of India’s poor live outside the 200 poorest districts.
While 28.4% of households in the poorest districts participate in MGNREGA, 22.8% of households in other districts also benefit from MGNREGA.
The 22.8% of households from other districts are actually more reliant on MGNREGA income than households in the 200 poorest districts.

The presentation of some of the early results on MGNREGA participation was chaired by Dr Pronab Sen, Chairman, National Statistical Commission while the Panel Discussion on Research Needs for Effective Policy Design was chaired by Dr Satish Agnihotri , Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat.

It was further discussed hat reducing the number of districts covered under MGNREGA would “run against a fundamental premise of the Act” – to ensure that gainful employment providing basic economic security is a human right. Reducing the scheme to just 200 of India’s 676 districts would take away economic security for many. It would be better to focus on the poorest households, rather than the poorest districts, to ensure that MGNREGA benefits those who need its income security the most. The roundtable discussion was attended by over 30 people including politicians, academics and policy makers.

Information also available at http://www.pacsindia.org/news-articles/MGNREGA-roundtable-discussion-081214

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