K.N. Raj was not just one of India’s finest economists, but also a great builder of institutions and an exceptional teacher, economist Sudipto Mundle has said.
Prof. Mundle, who was till recently Professor Emeritus at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, was delivering the K.N. Raj memorial lecture at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS) here on Monday.
Virtually all of Prof. Raj’s work was “firmly evidence-based.” He was not very comfortable with explanatory hypotheses that could not be substantiated by empirical evidence, Prof. Mundle said.
Policy-oriented
“Most of his work was also policy-oriented, asking what policy interventions could address an identified challenge. His core interest throughout was India, and later, also Kerala,” he said.
Prof. Raj tended to see the Indian State as an “intermediate regime” wholly controlled neither by the workers nor the capitalists, but by a relatively autonomous intermediate class, particularly the bureaucracy, Prof. Mundle said. This did not sit well with several Marxist scholars as it was contrary to the Marxian concept of the capitalist State as a tool controlled by the capitalist class in their class struggle with the workers.
As a teacher, Prof. Raj would be remembered for his humility and his penchant for employing debate and dialogue and collaborative research as teaching tools.
“Here was one of India’s leading economists, who had sat at the high table of policy-making in India and worked closely with Nehru from the making of the first five-year Plan onwards. He was respected by political leaders and academics not just in India but all around the world. Yet, he would discuss issues as one among equals, open to other opinions and never enforcing his views,” Prof. Mundle recalled.
He also touched upon Prof. Raj’s role as an institution builder. This capacity of his was amply evident in his role in the development of the Delhi School of Economics and, later, CDS.
Legacy
The CDS, he said, was Prof. Raj’s memorial, a living and vibrant centre of scholarship that formed his legacy. In establishing CDS, Prof. Raj’s focus was not on pure theory but empirical analysis of the Indian economy and Kerala, he said.
