K.N. Raj laid foundation for India’s welfare state (Obituary)

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM - Kakkadan Nandanath Raj, the eminent economist who died here Wednesday at 86, was among those few who laid the foundation for independent India’s development process by helping prepare its first Five Year Plan in 1950.

Fresh out of the London School of Economics where his thesis was on the monetary policy of India’s central bank, he was barely 26, yet full of ideas, when he was asked to help draft the Five Year Plan and write its foreword.

Just ‘Raj’ to friends, he was personally selected by India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to join the Planning Commission as an economist at the urging of the celebrated Harold Laski. To date, the institution’s long-term vision is built on Raj’s basic philosophy.

“I think most of the things welfare economists talk about are those that are obvious to all of us, especially the common people,” he once wrote, clearly defining the role he thought the successive Five Year Plans must play to help the average citizen.

“Many people like me practiced welfare economics without knowing it was welfare economics because we were anxious economics should help the poor. But people who take economic theory literally would say that this is not our problem.”

The Planning Commission, founded in 1950, was not the only institution he helped set up — and development remained at the core of his philosophy whichever institution he was associated with in his long career, be it in academics or policy planning.

The central objective of planning in India at the present stage is to initiate a process of development which will raise living standards and open out to the people new opportunities for a richer and more varied life, he wrote in the foreword of the First Five Year Plan.

Former prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao counted on him for advice when the country’s liberal economic reform process was launched in July 1991, notably on issues such as devaluation of the Indian rupee, focus on farm sector and decentralised planning.

He was one of the main forces behind the prestigious Delhi School of Economics. He also set up the Thiruvananthapuram-based Centre for Development Studies (CDS). He was vice chancellor of Delhi University, where he worked for 18 years till 1971.

Raj also had a brief stint as a journalist for an English daily in Colombo, during which time he covered the aftermath of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in Sri Lanka.

An economist, teacher, researcher, pragmatic reformer, a Marxist and a Keynesian all rolled into one, Raj was conferred the Padma Vibhushan — the second highest civilian honour — in 2000 by then president and close childhood friend K.R. Narayanan.

Though several years his junior, eminent people like Manmohan Singh, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen and Prof Jagdish Bhagwati considered Raj their friend, philosopher and guide.

“He was a great teacher, eminent institution builder, humane economist, a true patriot, brilliant visionary and one of the tallest Indians,” said Sanjaya Baru, editor of Business Standard, former media advisor to Manmohan Singh and a student of the late professor at CDS.

Born May 13, 1924 at Thrissur in Kerala, Raj idolised on his father K.N. Gopalan, who was a senior judge in Chennai and a noted social reformer. He was also a student of another celebrated economist Malcom Adiseshiah at Madras Christian College.

Raj spent his last years with his sons Gopal and Dinesh at a simple home in the Kerala capital built by celebrated architect Laurie Baker. His wife Sarasamma, a doctor by profession, died in 2002.