On the Ideas of India podcast, Shruti Rajagopalan spoke with Shreyas Narla and Kadambari Shah on the 1991 project, its origin, scope, goals, public repository, and oral histories.

Shruti Rajagopalan: Welcome to Ideas of India, where we examine the academic ideas that can propel India forward. My name is Shruti Rajagopalan, and I am a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Today my guests are my colleagues Shreyas Narla and Kadambari Shah. Shreyas is a research scholar and Kadambari is a research associate at the Mercatus Center with the India program. We talked about completing five years of the 1991 Project, how it started, it’s scope, the oral histories of the reformers in 1991, papers, essays, fellowships and much more. 

For a full transcript of this conversation, including helpful links of all the references mentioned, click the link in the show notes or visit mercatus.org/podcasts. 

Hi, welcome to Ideas of India, though it feels like I’m in one of our team meetings. Because today my guests are my wonderful colleagues, Kadambari Shah and Shreyas Narla, who've been on the podcast before and whom all of you know, as my listeners. Today we’re going to talk about the 1991 reforms and the 1991 Project. This week and month is the 35th anniversary of the 1991 reforms—it’s almost hard for me to believe—and also the fifth anniversary of the project. We kicked it off in the 30th year of the reforms. It is such a pleasure to have both of you here, and thank you for joining me.

Shreyas Narla: Glad to be back, though we’ve pretty much been here the whole time.

Kadambari Shah: [chuckles] Thank you for having us, Shruti.

The Origin Story

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, this is so much fun. Like I said, this is the 35th anniversary. I must be getting really old because I remember the reforms actually happening and reading about it in the papers. Second, I also can’t believe it’s been five years of the project. It still feels like every day, we’re doing something new; every week, we’re discovering something new, but I guess we’ve been at this for a while.

SHAH: Yes. I don’t think I’ve ever asked you guys. I joined the project a year into it, but how did it start?

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, that’s a good story. The way it started is, we were talking about the reforms, and at that time one of our colleagues and all of our good friend, Prakhar Misra, was on the team before he was off to do his doctoral studies. Shreyas, Prakhar, and I used to work with each other. It was COVID, and we were talking about the reforms, and I realized that they didn’t know too much about it, which is really weird now that you know both of them. They’re about as nerdy as it gets when it comes to the policy wonk space.

I was like, “If they don’t know exactly why the 1991 reforms happened or how they happened, then no one will know.” Because as I always say, 70 percent plus of India was born after me, which means, a very large number of Indians, almost two-thirds, were born after the reforms. They really don’t have any lived experience of socialism and License Permit Raj, command-and-control times. They’ve really just lived in this post-liberalization world without License Permit Raj in the draconian way it used to be. There is still a lot of License Permit Raj at local and state levels.

That was really what got me started. I said, “If they don’t know the story, then hardly anyone knows the story, and the only people who know the story are those older than me.” We started talking about it. Shreyas, you were there right at the start. What did we decide to do in the beginning? Now my memory is failing me a bit.

NARLA: Kadambari, actually, to answer your question, and then to get to your question, Shruti, I’m a lawyer by training, which means that I’m going to only look at the law and never really ask the question: Where did this come from, and how did this come about, and what’s the context in which these laws are being legislated upon? It’s a given for me.

When I look at a labor law, when I look at Industrial Disputes Act, or when I looked at the MRTP for—that was the extent of my exposure to history of policy, so to speak, or the law. Or if I look at a competition act, I’m looking [at] them as just bare laws but not necessarily why they’re happening and in what context they’re taking place. This is exactly what the conversation was a little over five years ago when Shruti, Prakhar, and I were chatting about the ’91 reforms.

I realized I had a headline understanding of what the reforms were, because if you either went to law school or you had some exposure to studying economics at school level, you hear the abbreviation, LPG, and that’s about it. You get a sense of who Narasimha Rao was or who Manmohan Singh was.

Vinay had written the Half-Lion book. Sanjaya Baru, though, he wrote Accidental Prime Minister. In a way, these conversations were happening. These books were out there. One was reading. You had some understanding of it, but again, I’m a post –’91 child, so I basically grew up with having consumer goods at home. I don’t have lived experience. I didn’t have a sense of how different life was before that.

Even through the educational journey, you’re really taking a lot of things as a given, which is what actually motivated us to start the ’91 Project with the idea that this will be a pedagogical project. We will write materials for my generation, my peers, and who have come afterwards, as a way to, one, get exposed to what this literature is, but in a way that it’s well understood by people from across the spectrum of disciplines—where the economic jargon or the technical concepts will not go over our head. We will understand what really happened, understand the weight of the situation as well.

Because when you’re talking about the crisis, when you’re talking about balance-of-payments crisis, or when you’re talking about the war that was happening, these are terms, but what do they really mean to somebody who’s not studied economics? That was the intent behind what we set up the ’91 Project to be, which meant that we were going to have these simple timelines to explain how the crisis unfolded, and then what did the reforms do?

We wrote these few early pieces, Shruti's essay and mine and Prakhar's essay, which were really a narrative style of portraying the importance of the episode, what the reforms did, and what it really unleashed for the Indian economy. That was really what the project was supposed to be about. But of course, when we touch something, it’s not going to be just a simple thing. [chuckles] But that’s really the origin story.

Rajagopalan: Now I realize, hearing Shreyas talk, that he was working on a paper on MRTP, actually, so that’s a big part of how the conversation started. But the other part of it was also, I just realized no one even knew what had happened. Our initial efforts were actually just to tell people what had happened.

Right now, we have a West Asian crisis. We had a similar West Asian crisis and war. Oil prices went up. All these things happened then, except India had such few reserves, and the Indian economy was generally in such a terrible situation, that very soon, it came to a point where India did not have enough money to pay for more than two weeks’ worth of exports. That’s the crisis part.

In a country as large as India and an economy as large as India, there are many silent crises which we don’t talk about, like people not getting jobs. Just the fact that there are still so many people who are so poor and without opportunity, or it is so hard for people to start a business. There are lots of little and large crises going on in India, but the crisis which birthed the reforms was just about not being able to pay your bills. Which was an enormous embarrassment, to actually have to ship the gold out of the country because no one trusts your economic ability to pay something back. It was a very big moment.

The initial part of the project, to answer your question, was all about, “Let’s tell people what happened, in what order it happened.” What was the political instability? Three prime ministers in quick succession. What was the economic instability with the Gulf War and rising oil prices and enormous deficits and a currency which actually had nothing to do with its real value and had a huge black market and so on, and then how the reforms actually tackled it.

It was supposed to be a really simple project, Kadambari. We started ideating it around March. It was supposed to end in end of July, and we were done. That’s it. Then, of course, as Shreyas says, nothing is ever done when we touch it. It just becomes a thing.

Shah: [chuckles] I’m so glad that this project was started, not only because it helped me learn as well, as a post–’91 child myself, but also because it’s been so exciting to work on since I joined the team.

Rajagopalan: When did you join the team? This was about six months since the release of the project and about nine months of us ideating. 

Shah: Exactly. Exactly.

Rajagopalan: That’s a good origin story too, because I wanted Kadambari to be on our team well before that. When she had finished her master’s degree— we’ve known each other a while, so I had actually spoken to her about what her plans are. She was doing some very exciting research for one of her professors. I was like, “OK, if you’re doing exciting research with someone else and it’s putting you on the right track, then you stay at that, and maybe we’ll work together another time.”

Then six months later, two things happened. One, the 1991 Project happened, which she was very interested in joining. And two, Prakhar started his PhD. So, we really needed someone on the project. We both called each other, and we were like, “OK, now is the time to do this.” That was also a very nice part. She was really there when the project started, just not directly working on it.

Shah: Yes. I think one of the very first meetings I joined was actually an oral history with Mr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, that’s right.

NARLA: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Was he our first oral history?

NARLA: No, he wasn’t our first oral history. He was our third one by then.

RAJAGOPALAN: The first one was Dr. Rangarajan. That’s right. Before you jump in on the oral history with Montek and Rangarajan, how did we get started on the oral histories exactly?

NARLA: This actually goes to the starting point of the ’91 Project. I was called on to work on writing the biographies of the reformers. Because of my general interest in policy history, you said, “Hey, why don’t you at least document who these reformers were and exactly what their points of intervention were in the ’91 story?” It was a lovely— 

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, I wanted him to do a lot more, by the way, but Shreyas was like, “I’m not an economist, and I have no idea what I’m talking about.” I’m like, “Trust me, you know enough economics to be able to do this.” But I don’t know, Shreyas was very nervous, and he got scared by the MRTP Act.

Launching the Oral Histories Initiative

NARLA: I think one was that for sure. But I think—Everyone was scared of the MRTP Act, as we know from history, including our reformers, because they had the tough task of actually dismantling it. [laughs] I started out  documenting these profiles. Fascinating to see what their backgrounds were, but also to understand how these players interacted with each other, what their points of intervention were, whether it was Dr. Rangarajan as a deputy governor, and then he comes back as governor. Montek Singh Ahluwalia, who worked at the World Bank and then enters into the Finance Ministry as an economic adviser, and then, we know his journey, right up to his role as commerce secretary in ’91 and later on as secretary, Department of Economic Affairs and as finance secretary.

Some of them had written their memoirs, some of them had just written some essays or book chapters. We had some general sense of the story. There were obviously some papers that were written, these survey chapters and survey papers.

We had all the big names, the usual. You have Manmohan Singh, Narasimha Rao, Montek, and everybody. That’s what’s the documented material, whether it’s the Wiki entry or any of the other papers or survey chapters written. There were some journal papers that documented some names, but these are long forgotten. We’re talking 30 years ago, 25 years ago, these were written.

If you’re actually in it, you’re trying to read and look at, maybe you’ll find it on a JSTOR, and that’s the level of engagement with the episode. That means that it’s, one, this information is—I wouldn’t say gatekept, but it was definitely information that’s not easily accessible to a larger group of people. 

When we were setting up the ’91 Project, we set up those timelines, we wrote these biographies, and people appreciated it. People wrote to us. From our fraternity, there was K.P. Krishnan, who spoke to us about it. In fact, I remember going to meet him with Prakhar. He started dropping these names of different secretaries, joint secretaries who were in the ministry at that point in time. I’d not heard of Jayanta Roy in any story, but he was the Commerce Ministry’s economic adviser.

That’s how I discovered—and N.K. Singh had just written his memoirs, so I’d not read it yet, but he came up in conversation that he was at the Fund Division in the Finance Ministry as joint secretary. The fact that Rakesh Mohan had been around for a long time, and of course, it was his book chapter that he wrote in the 25th anniversary volume that he had produced. In a way, it was him talking about his journey.

Obviously, we were piecing these stories together, and then we had folks like K.P. talking to us and telling us all these little anecdotes. It felt interesting and exciting, and I said, “But where do we get them from?” Then they said, “Well, this is when you speak to these actual reformers. You’ll have to talk to them. When you talk to them, you’ll get to know about it, but they’re also old. Which means that we don’t have the luxury of time.” 

Also, the fact that we have to respect their—I’m not going to mention these details, but there were several of our reformers who were not medically in a position to talk to us, and that was already five years ago.

And so, there was a sense of urgency there. That was the origin point where we were encouraged from members in the policy community, “They may have written memoirs, but not everything makes it to the memoir. There may have been survey chapters; not everything makes it to the final edit, which means that through the cracks, you will miss out [on] the nuances of their relationships, the influences.” 

RAJAGOPALAN: Also, this intergenerational thing, right, Shreyas? For instance, Ajay Shah and Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, who we all know really well. They’ve heard these stories firsthand from, let’s say, Vijay Kelkar or Rangarajan, or someone like that. Now, we are hearing a second version of it.

NARLA: That’s true.

RAJAGOPALAN: Right? It’s like, first of all, now memory is failing, you don’t want this to be a Chinese whispers kind of thing, where they hear it from a source, and then we hear it from them and—  That was one thing that they warned us about, that we can tell you some information, but you should go straight to the source.

The second part of it also is, I realized we don’t have good institutional history and memory. So much of this was done by technocrats, Kadambari, so you know this. You worked with government. We don’t have a system where when a particular bureaucrat or technocrat leaves an office, they don’t do an exit interview.

They don’t do any kind of handoff. We can’t even find, in India, starting and ending dates. When I say dates, I don’t mean the exact date, I mean years. [chuckles] We can’t even find the year when someone started, and someone ended in a particular department or office.

So, unless we actually talk to the people, and then triangulate the same information from two, three different sets of people, you don’t have a good handle on what actually happened. It’s a little bit like Rashomon. There’s some material out there and there’s something you can pick. Then you actually have to go to people, and they all have slightly different versions of this. Then if four out of five people give you a very similar version, you’re like, “OK, I think that’s the right one,” or, “We’ll take that as the dominant account.” That was a very big part of it. We realized that really during the oral history, but we realized that even before starting the oral history project, that we just don’t know enough.

You guys know this, and you’ve heard me say this many times. I think this is India’s second freedom.

I think the reforms are as important as getting universal adult franchise or something, because I think participating in the marketplace is as important as participating in the political space. Not everyone was allowed to participate in the marketplace. Whether as a consumer or as a producer, it doesn’t matter. You just don’t have market access. This is, I think, one of the most important things that’s happened in my lifetime and one of the most important things that has happened in post-independent India, and we just don’t have a good sense of it. 

NARLA: This reminds me of a little anecdote that Dr. Acharya mentioned to us in his oral history where, when he became chief economic adviser—I’m talking just after the ’91 reforms, so this is the ’92 period. Then he has one of the longest tenures—actually, the longest tenure— 

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m sorry to interrupt, but that itself was hard to piece together because there was a chief economic adviser, there was an economic consultant, and another economic adviser all in quick succession, and we were like, “What is going on here?” Even that took us a second to get a handle on, the move from Deepak Nayyar to Ashok Desai to Shankar Acharya.

NARLA: Exactly, exactly. The fact that there is this whole concept of a UPSC entry and a non-UPSC entry—where are these rule books? Who gets to understand—unless someone tells you and explains this to you. 

But Shankar Acharya told us how, when he became chief economic adviser, there was no board. When I say “board,” like a wooden board, a plaque in the office of the chief economic adviser, which, oftentimes, an industry secretary or a finance secretary office would have, where you get to have the entire list of all the previous chief economic advisers with their date of appointment to the date of retirement.

One didn’t exist for the chief economic adviser’s office. He was the 10th chief economic adviser, so nine people had already held that post. There wasn’t a clear—even for those nine—  

RAJAGOPALAN: It exists now. 

NARLA: Because he set it up.

RAJAGOPALAN: I know.

NARLA: Finally documented. He said that even for those nine, for the early—some of the advisers, they didn’t have the exact date. They had maybe the month, a rough estimate of the month they joined and the month they left, but not even the date. You’re talking roughly about 45, 50 years of independence. Within that period, we didn’t have—one of the senior-most technocratic positions in the union government of India didn’t have a clean— 

RAJAGOPALAN: In the Finance Ministry.

NARLA: In the Finance Ministry, of all ministries, didn’t have a clean record of who held that office for how long or specifically how long they held that office. That’s the sense you get from these oral histories as well. 

But this is the thing. Oral histories, if you just generally look at how they are done, like you said, it’s a free-flowing conversation. You can go talk to them, and you must make them feel comfortable. They’ll start speaking. They’ll remember. They’ll recollect. They’ll share. That’s how, often, they go: You press the record button, and you just run with it.

At that point in time, the 1947 Partition Project was doing the rounds in India. Delhi was rife with these sessions or events that the 1947 Partition Project was doing. That was the moment. You had a sense of how oral histories were being done. They were all, like I said, very—I wouldn’t say “casual,” but they were definitely a lot more personable. It’s like having a family type of conversation, and then you’re just capturing the essence of it. We couldn’t do that for something like this.

RAJAGOPALAN: Maybe one part of it is also, it made sense to do it that way for that particular project. 

Because partition is also personal memories. People are talking about very traumatic events. We also knew that that just wouldn’t work for us because we are not trying to get the texture of something. We’re actually trying to get the technical details of something.

NARLA: Exactly.

RAJAGOPALAN: Which is why we never went the oral history way. We were going the documentation way.

NARLA: Documentation.

Documentation and Memory

RAJAGOPALAN: All credit to Shreyas. He’s the one who figured out how to marry the two together. How do we marry really good documentation and excellent methodological discipline with also getting people to share their memories of what happened? You need a lot of room for technical detail, but you also need a lot of room for personal and institutional memory. I think Shreyas is the one who cracked that puzzle because none of us knew what we were doing.

NARLA: Well, I can’t take the entire credit there because you have to look for inspiration. You have to look for guidance. One of the places we had looked for was—obviously World Bank had done an institutional memory oral history project, but it felt like a bit of an in-group speak thing. Perhaps also because I was coming from the outside, so I necessarily didn’t understand the references. But those transcripts read like an ongoing conversation, and I was eavesdropping without much context. I realized that if ’91 Project, with the intention we had set it up, our oral histories couldn’t do that.

At that time, Prakhar leading the way, and given how enterprising he is with his networks, he was able to tap into different people to set up some meetings for us. I remember you had made the connection with Nona Storr, who was at GMU. Nona had done oral histories internally at the Mercatus Center a while ago, I believe. 

When we first spoke to Nona, she understood this dilemma. It can’t be these personal conversations. It’s also institutional memory, so how do we do it? She said, “It’s fine to send them questions in advance.” 

Now, she said, “Let’s figure out how you do that, because you can’t be too specific to the point that you curb and then alter their memory because you’re prompting them. But at the same time, you can’t be loosey-goosey in the way you’re asking those questions, because then how will they recollect and have the specific details you’re looking for? You’ll have to find that right balance.” Now, that was going to be a trial and error for us. We spoke to Ryan Perkins, who was at Stanford University at that—still at Stanford University. He was a wonderful reference point for us because he had set up—I think he was the curator for the South Asian and Islamic Studies. He was one of the top archivists for that particular department. He gave us some insights. 

Stanford has a very rich, detailed work on oral history projects. They had these lovely “10 Tips to Remember” stuff. They also had templates for contracts of, how do you handle oral history and postproduction and releases, and things like that? 

So, Prakhar and I really sat down. We had these conversations with these individuals. We had all these leads from K.P. Krishnan and Ajay Shah who had done these sessions with us, giving us some frameworks to fall back on in understanding who to speak to and what context we must speak to them with. 

Then came up with this rubric, complete props to Prakhar on this one, where he said, “We’re going to ask them questions about the reforms, about the individuals and the ideas and influences,” which is really our Mercatus framework, the three i’s, and how we’re going to craft these questions.

A lot of workshopping those questions where you want. When we first started out, and you wrote that fantastic cold email to Dr. Rangarajan, and he really, really just so generously wrote back and responded.

Then, in a way, we worked out that template where the first thing that we do is we spoke to the reformers. We talked to them and generally had to get a sense of how comfortable they were participating, what they wanted to speak about, what were the limits. Really, as I call it, setting the boundaries. That made it to our note as we developed the project that the first thing we do is we set the boundaries with the reformers of what they want to talk about. 

Also, obviously, get them to share documents that we didn’t have access to. Oftentimes, it’s something as basic as their résumé. Because online, you may get some bits of their profiles, but you don’t get specific dates and specific years of what they did. Because our idea was not just to go and talk to them [about] what they did in the reforms. It was also to try and understand where they were coming from. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

NARLA: If Dr. Rangarajan was studying—and this is there in the oral histories—studying at UPenn, which were those years? Who was at the department? What was he reading? The fact that he went and attended Milton Friedman’s lecture, where are you going to get that information? To get that answer, you have to go back as far as you can, understand their profile, place them in the context, because then you can ask them that question.

Creating that rubric of questions required us to do this massive amount of preparation of just piecing the entire chronology of their professional journey together, then identifying what was happening at that particular point in time. Placing their journey in that larger global context, and relating to what they may have potentially to do with India, if they were abroad, or if they were in India, where they were in India at that particular point in time. Something as basic as asking, “What motivated you to come back?” That is how we really went about setting up this rubric, where we created these questions, which were specific enough that we could get them to elicit details, but never necessarily prompting them or altering their memory. That was one cardinal rule we stuck to always. 

We just finished recording with Jairam Ramesh and Tarun Das, and they just happened within a week. Preparing and talking and setting boundaries, everything happened in one go. Apropos to them because incredible memory. I can say that for everybody else.

I remember Dr. Rangarajan’s first recording, he had printed out our questions. He had then printed out the answers to those questions, all his notes. Then, press record. Incredible. That was the joy of being able to do that because they took it seriously enough to come show up and talk to us and not leave it to their own memory. He was then 89 going on 90 at Madras School of Economics. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Also, huge credit to Mercatus. Kadambari, you know this. I’m surrounded by historians of thought, even if that’s not what their primary thing is. All my mentors, like my dissertation adviser, Peter Boettke, Tyler Cowen, Mario Rizzo, all of them are fantastic historians of economic thought. Studying the history of economic thought at Mercatus, it’s just something you do. It’s like you’re doing intermediate microeconomics or something like that. We all know our history of economic thought really, really well. It’s not something that’s even taught in other schools at the PhD level. I think GMU might be the last place that still does it. That influence obviously came into some of our policy stuff also.

There was this big Hurricane Katrina project that happened after the hurricane, and we did oral histories at that time. Nona has done oral histories in the Caribbean and in the United States. We had people in-house that we could just talk to. We just talk to people around us. I think it was Dan Rothschild who told me. He was like, “Have you spoken to Nona?” I have known Nona since 2008, but I had just forgotten this little detail that she’s the perfect person to talk to about this.

Mercatus is also that kind of place which is really particular about how much you know history of economic thought and how much context matters. They just brought it to India. Also, people in Mercatus just don’t have baggage. In India, there were so many naysayers. They’re like, “Look, no one’s going to cooperate with you. It’s going to be so expensive. No one will talk to young people. No one remembers anything. They’ll all complain about each other and politics.” Shreyas is being gracious, and he hasn’t mentioned any of the naysayers, but there were more naysayers than there were cheerleaders, but none at Mercatus.

Mercatus was just like, “Run with it.” They were also very open. They were like, “Yes, if Stanford has the best methodology, use it. You want us to go reach out to someone at the Smithsonian, let us know.” Mercatus has that culture of, yes/and, that improv comedy culture. This is exactly what we had in the 1991 Project. We were making it up as we go along, but we really did have that yes/and culture.

Finally, despite all our connections in policy space, and K.P. Krishnan, and Niranjan, and everyone else, the first person who recorded with us, as Shreyas said, was a cold email to Dr. Rangarajan. I have lived in a time when Dr. Rangarajan’s signature was on the ₹100 note. For me, Rangarajan is that person. He was RBI governor, a really big deal. I had no understanding that if we cold-email him, he’ll write back. Not only did he write back, he wrote back in 24 hours. He didn’t ask us who we are. He didn’t ask us for any credentials. He just said, “This is fantastic. You guys are doing something amazing. How can I help?" That was it, and we were off to the races.

We did a 30-minute call with him, if I remember correctly. We set up everything, and this was peak COVID just before the Delta wave. Shreyas, Prakhar, and I managed to actually go to Madras School of Economics and record the first two sessions in person. The way Dr. Rangarajan just dealt with us and dealt with everything else, we were like, “Oh, this is the way it needs to be done.” 

He asked for three, four weeks before he prepped and looked at the questions and made notes. We were like, “Oh, now we do this with everyone else.” He gave us answers, and he told us he needs breaks because, just age. We were like, “Oh, we should do this with all of them.” Because many of them are junior to him, but we do need to give people breaks. People do get exhausted, then they start misremembering details.

I always joke, Shreyas and I joke, that when we grow up, we want to be Dr. Rangarajan, but it’s really true. He set up the rubric for how someone who has occupied very important public office should help create that institutional memory after that. Once we had that experience with Dr. Rangarajan, it went into our template, and then we just use that for everyone else.

And the reputation! The moment people heard we’ve spoken with Dr. Rangarajan, everyone said yes. Shreyas, you should tell the story of accosting senior people at the airport.

NARLA: Gracious Mr. Chidambaram. [chuckles] I was in Delhi. Just as I was walking at Terminal 3, I could see—he’s so distinctive.

RAJAGOPALAN: The white veshti.

NARLA: The white veshti, how can you not? But no big guards, nobody. Just him. I had this 10-second dilemma there, wondering, “Should I, or should I not? How do I bring this up?” I said, “Well, this is now or never. I don’t know which other way to reach him. Unless somebody makes a connection. He’s right here in front of me.” 

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, and he had cold-emailed all these people.

NARLA: We had cold-emailed these people before. In this moment, I said, “He’s right there. I can either go and speak to him or I can let this be.” Then I just, as Shruti said, accosted him. I caught his attention and I said, “Mr. Chidambaram, we do the 1991 Project.” I gave him the quick, I would say, 10-second spiel. Then I said, “We are doing these oral histories. We are talking to the reformers.” Until then, he’s looking at me, and he’s just staring at me and trying to understand what I’m saying.

Then I said, “We recorded first with Dr. Rangarajan, and we finished about four hours with him.” That was it. His face changed completely. When Shruti was talking about the credibility and the reputation that he has, and that in a way passed on to us and helped build our goodwill so much that the moment I just dropped his name, Mr. Chidambaram said, “Just email me. Let’s set it up.” That was it. That’s how we ended up having the chance to actually record the oral history with Mr. Chidambaram.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Kadambari, you have to tell us now. You weren’t there for the first set of recordings with Dr. Rangarajan. You joined literally a month after that. We finished with Dr. Rangarajan in December, and I remember you started with us in January. Were you there? Was the first one Montek Singh Ahluwalia, or was it Shankar Acharya?

SHAH: It was Montek Singh Ahluwalia and then followed by Dr. Shankar Acharya. For me, I remember being so nervous in the very first one, not knowing—I think I barely said three words in that entire recording. I was just so taken by how—there was just such a sense of collegiality between the different reformers. Even when they’re disagreeing with each other, there’s a sense of respect, which is very rare to see today, in the way that they talk to each other, about each other.

For me, it was all of them after that, followed by Dr. Ashok Desai and Mr. Narayana Murthy. We recorded with him as well. I feel like there was so much I could learn, not just from their stories, but the way that they conducted themselves.

NARLA: I remember, it was in this first—that was the very same recording where—and kudos to Shruti for making the most of that moment. When Mr. Montek—we just started, press record, it was a few minutes. Dr. Rakesh Mohan called him, because it was, I think, around the time of the budget.

RAJAGOPALAN: It was the time of the budget. That’s right. This was end of January.

NARLA: These people are out of office, but they are still interested in, “Have you heard about the budget? What are you doing about the budget? Are you going for conversation? Are you doing sessions?” That was the conversation.

It’s not on record, but it was such a sweet moment, and the moment that Shruti said, “Would you please make an introduction for us?” To introduce us to Rakesh Mohan.  Well, that whole thing is history now. We had Dr. Rakesh Mohan on record with us a whole 12 hours.

RAJAGOPALAN: You’re not the only hustler, Shreyas. You accost people at airports; I accost them on Zoom.

NARLA: That’s true. [laughter] That’s literally how we build this project up.  Shruti was talking about credentials and connections and some degree of in-group behavior that allows people to have certain access. We were really, in a way, outsiders to this entire network. Every individual we’ve brought on board has been through cold emails, cold introductions, just talking about ourselves and our project, and introducing and relying on that.

Obviously, with each of the reformers lending their goodwill and credibility and supporting us, we were able to really build this up in the last five years. I will always credit Nona for setting me off on that first journey, where she said, “Just go with your instinct and build it up. Don’t worry so much about which methodology to follow. Learn from everything. Go by your instinct.” 

RAJAGOPALAN: Kadambari, we’ve had these conversations where we can’t find something. If we can find something, it’s on a blog or a newspaper column of someone reminiscing. How do we use it?

Everything for us is about triangulation. Then it became you pulling together all their books and what they’ve done; Shreyas pulling together questions for oral history.

The reason the methodology matters is, serious historians of thought, political historians, everyone, doctoral students, they can use this material. If you’re running some kind of regression discontinuity design, you need an exact date when that’s going to work. If you can’t find the date, you can’t do it. If you just share the date on a blog, it’s not credible.

I think us being researchers, even though Nona was right, and we’ve done a lot of it by instinct, and we’ve made it up as we go along, but we also knew that the end product needs to be good enough for researchers to be able to use it and for researchers to be able to credibly cite it.

You can only do that through triangulation. You have the oral history, but you also have the column they wrote that month, and you also have their doctoral dissertation. Then you also figure out from the acknowledgement section of the doctoral dissertation if the influences they mentioned in the oral history are actually the same ones that they wrote about 50 years ago or 80 years ago, depending on who the person is. This is really the way to triangulate.

Credit to so many people, but really credit to the two of you for having built the oral history part out, to Shreyas, and the repository out, to you, Kadambari. You should tell us about that part of it. That’s a huge piece of the puzzle.

Building the Repository

SHAH: I can’t take credit for the entire repository because Shreyas was instrumental in the expert committee reports part of it; just sourcing them, making them digital, and then, of course, putting them on the website. I'll let Shreyas talk about that first.

NARLA: Sure. It was really because of the oral history prep. Like you said, Shruti, one, we are obviously piecing their journey together. When we are setting up those questions, I need to know which expert committees they were part of. A big part of the project’s goal is also that we are talking about, of course, their individual contributions, but also the entire trajectory of policy history, especially the history of ideas. 

That’s happening through these expert committees, a thing that I wouldn't say has become a rarity today, but certainly not at the level that they would happen through the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

NARLA: The 1991 moment didn’t happen in vacuum. That’s something that we have repeatedly learned through the oral histories, and that’s because of these expert committee reports.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Niranjan, who’s been a mentor to me and Kadambari and now you also, Shreyas—I think Niranjan told me this years ago. He said the history of Indian economic thought is not found at universities and journal articles; it is really buried in expert committee reports. Niranjan has always told me these one-off sentences that have never left me in all these years. But this is something that really did not leave me, because he was right.

We didn’t have a deep university culture. We had very few journals in India during that period of time. You have very few journals, very few editors, and a lot of people in government were not writing for economic journals. So, how do you get all of this material of what people thought and did after they finished their PhD? We do have Dr. Manmohan Singh's doctoral dissertation. We have it for Dr. Rakesh Mohan, for Dr. C. Rangarajan. But we don’t have what they wrote that can connect back to that original research that they did later.

To be able to piece that together, it’s really through committee reports. One easy way we got started is just when we were doing the oral history, they told us which committees they were on.

Dr. Rangarajan was working on his memoir. At that time, it wasn’t out yet, but Montek’s memoir was out, and it mentioned all the committees that he was in. That stuff came through the oral histories. Then, of course, again, Shreyas capitalized and started collecting all that material and then, Kadambari, you started writing up things for the expert committees. But, Shreyas, go ahead.

NARLA: That’s pretty much it, Shruti. You mentioned Dr. Rangarajan’s oral history. He just kept referring to the different committees and the things that he—the Sukhamoy Chakravarty committee, which we knew of. The report was available on one of those central secretariat library websites. We had culled out the digital copy, and it was part of our prep. But then he spoke about, because he was part of it, what recommendations they were making. Then he listed out, as he went about giving his answers, the different committee reports and the different ideas they were working on.

When you make those many references of those committee reports, I had to go back and check, did we have them in our database? Were they accessible or not available? I remember, for him, we had managed to piece them together. I used to go to Nehru Library back in the day and get the physical copies and scan a few of them. I remember one of the things that oftentimes they all would refer to was the P.C. Alexander committee report.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, my god.

NARLA: The Parliament Library had it. We were able to get access and get a copy and then scan it and keep it. As it happens, because by then you were telling people that we have this. . . . In a way, people knew of us as the 1991 people, and very sweetly, Dr. Panagariya one day wrote to us saying, “Do you by chance happen to have the Alexander Committee report?” Because it talks about reforms in the export side. And, voilà, we had it.

RAJAGOPALAN: He told us, he’s like, “You’re the only people who had it.” Can you imagine? This is someone who’s been the vice chair of the NITI Aayog. All these committee reports actually used to live in the Planning Commission website. When it got revamped into the NITI Aayog website, a lot of this stuff got missed. So much of it is just accidental, right? Things don’t map perfectly. We’ve had a couple of website migrations, so we know this. That there needs to be no evil plot for committee reports and documents to get lost. When you’re migrating these things, sometimes things just get lost. To have digital copies of this stuff was so important.

Abid Hussain, P.C. Alexander, Sukhamoy Chakravarty, and Arjun Sengupta, these are four committee reports that came up over and over and over and over again. They were the very early ones. Nobody had copies of them.

Now, of course, we do, and we’ve put it out for people. But, Shreyas being in India that time, you being in India that time, you being in India that time, Kadambari, it was a huge help because there’s no way I could have unearthed this—this is not there in the Library of Congress or something that I have access to. It was really a labor of love. This is the labor of standing in line at a photocopy shop, getting it digitized, making sure the original copy is sent back to the people who’ve so kindly given it to us. There’s a lot of blood, sweat, and tears that’s gone into this.

NARLA: Very, very true. Then we were very lucky to have these two incredible RAs. At that point in time, RAs Samrudha Surana and Ankita Dinkar, who were an extra pair of hands for us, who would go do this grunt for us. Then Samrudha did the herculean task of actually helping write those short summaries, which we were able to then use and curate those reports on our website and just put the database up. Kadambari, you have the count. I think we have 100-plus.

SHAH: The website has just been a project in itself. I think that, talking of the public repository, especially if one goes to the website, it is very clear in terms of all the different committee reports. We have them in a PDF format, which is uploaded. Thanks to Shreyas for being able to scan the PDFs in a way that they are searchable, because the ones that we found were not.

For researchers, if you cannot search for a word in a 100-page document, it becomes even more tedious to do the work. It was a task to do that in itself. Then putting up the different write-ups on the committee reports as well was just something that we all learned from so much, because we were just doing that for months on end. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Kadambari, if I may back up a little bit. Sorry to interrupt you. My memory of the website is that we had the baby version of the website or the 1.0—which was just the timelines, right? I’m trying to put a few essays and things together. Yes, you are really the person who said, “No. This is much bigger than that. You’ve collected all this material, and we need to revamp it.” 

So, walk me through, and I think this will be—I know this is painful logistical detail. This is not exactly glamorous history of ideas, but just walk us through how something like that gets done, because I think that’d be super useful for younger people who are trying to kick off projects like this on their own.

SHAH: Yes. I think the first part of what we did is that we saw what was already on the website. I don’t think any version of the first website is available, [chuckles] but it was just a very simple one, just a one-page scroll. You just go down, you see what you wanted. We had very few sections. 

As the project grew, we realized we needed to do a lot more on the website. We needed to show a lot more because it was becoming very tedious to have it as just one page. The first step was just mapping it all out and putting it under different buckets, saying that this is what we want to do, this is what we want to showcase. How does it all fit together? Using that as a starting point. 

Huge thanks to Somesh and Arvind for revamping the website and making it what it is today. It’s far from stagnant. We keep adding new information every month. It is something that we want to keep it dynamic. We want to keep it something that is growing and something that is talking about ideas related to ‘91, of course, but also beyond. 

The 1991 Project Website

RAJAGOPALAN: Kadambari, if someone were to go to the 1991 website right now, what is the best way to think about what we have out there? Because have so much out there, which is not always obvious to people, and they’re amazed by it. Can you just tell people the different buckets, or a quick primer on how to navigate it for the completely uninitiated?

SHAH: Sure. Of course, we have the homepage, which lists the different buckets, which are writing, public repository, oral history, the different conversations. Everything fits neatly in these four buckets. Under writing, we have essays, we have policy papers, we have op-eds. Under the discussions and conversations, we have several video series on different buckets. For example, India’s Reform Journey Revisited, Conversations on Deregulation, the Talking Trade series that you had done, Shruti, with Dr. Panagariya. It’s a lot of different conversations and discussions that we’ve had.

Oral history is another one, which has everything related to the oral histories and snippets from conversations and so on. Then we have a public repository, which is split into the expert committee reports, the 1991 documents, so key documents that were available that we found, such as the M Document or Dr. Manmohan Singh's budget speech. We had these documents directly related to the reforms.

The third section is on ideas and influences. When we were doing the oral histories and the expert committee reports, we noticed another story emerging, which is essentially on the intellectual roots of reform thinking. It wasn’t just these reports that were available, but there was a whole host of events, debates, ideas, papers, scholarship, and, of course, the intellectual formation of the reformers themselves that was contributing to the reforms. They weren’t just policy decisions, and they didn’t occur in isolation.

For example, we had a lot of the books that were mentioned again and again, like the Bhagwati, and Desai 1968 book on India: Planning for Industrialisation, which, of course, critiqued protectionism and advocated for market reform. It was very influential in the policy community and actually foreshadowed the economic reforms. There were also some works that were not as well known, like Sudha Shenoy’s book on economic policies pre-1991, on how they essentially impacted poverty and progress.

We needed a systematic way to put these intellectual influences out there. If one goes to the website, the ideas and influences section, you can see that there is actually a timeline from the 1920s to today on the debates, the events, the people that contributed to this intellectual story behind the reforms, what ideas existed, how they reached people, how people responded to them, how they entered the policy imagination later on, and everything related to this project. It is a community project, so if anyone sees something that should be added or something that is missing, please do reach out to us.

RAJAGOPALAN: But, this is also, I think, what people are not seeing, and I’m able to see it so clearly because I know Shreyas and Kadambari so well. We are pros at falling into rabbit holes, right?

SHAH: That is true.

RAJAGOPALAN: Rabbit holes must be complete. [chuckles] We will burrow ourselves into it. This is something really I think both of you have as researchers. Shreyas’s rabbit-hole tendencies really came out in the oral history prep, and Kadambari’s really came out in the website. Now, what were those ideas? How do they come about them the first time? How do they move away from them? For that you actually need to map the whole thing out. You need to know who Sidney and Beatrice Webb are or who Harold Laski is because—

SHAH: Exactly.

RAJAGOPALAN: —their books were so influential in what came after. In fact, most of the reformers call themselves Fabian socialists. Then we’re like, “OK, who are these Fabian socialists?” At which point I will just drop the question over lunch or something. I’ve also read a lot of these books, and then Kadambari is off to the races to go find the book, to find a sensible copy, checking with Shreyas, “Is this copyright? OK, is it copyright expired? Can I put it up?” Then find a clean copy.

The biggest thing I think, Kadambari, that you’ve managed to do is provide context. Even for these books, if you just had a laundry list of books, it’s not very helpful to a young person who is going down the same rabbit hole as the rest of us. What you’ve managed to do is extraordinary, which is actually contextualize these works, saying, “This is this person. This is this book. It was written in this year.”

Now if someone goes to our website, they can connect all these dots. If you actually email Shreyas and request a copy of the oral history—because there are legal reasons we can’t just have it floating around with bots replicating it on websites and things like that—but it’s public and open-source. If you email us, we’ll definitely share it with you, but if you email us for a copy of the oral history and you read Shankar Acharya’s influences or Rangarajan’s influences or the expert committee reports they mention on the very same website, you can just search for those things and you will find them.

I think that’s the extraordinary thing you’ve done. You’ve created a space for fellow rabbit-hole lost souls like yourself where someone can enter your space and this intellectual project and spend seven hours on it. Or if someone needs to write a term paper or do a PhD dissertation, they will find a lot of the material that they’re looking for right there in one place. You don’t have to put a pin in it and go back to it six months later when the library sends you a copy. You can just say, “Oh, this was mentioned. Let me look at this and then let me look at this,” and so on and so forth.

SHAH: Yes. I also have to thank Harry David, and the Mercatus publications team for helping us get the write-ups in shape and helping us put them on the website.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. We’re all a little . . . Kadambari studied literature. Shreyas and I have PTSD from law background. Typos and howlers keep us awake at night. I don’t know if you guys know this. Harry David was with me in grad school. Harry taught me so much history of economic thought when it came to macro- and monetary economics, which was not my thing at all. We were in the same study group, so different versions of the—there’s a reason these are the people who are involved in this project, and the reason it takes shape like this because we’re all Boettke’s students or Tyler’s students or Mario’s students or something like that.

NARLA: You sound like our ’91 reformers in their oral histories, Shruti, [laughter] and how deep the connections are and how far they go and who taught them and how they learned everything from . . . and so on. [laughter]

RAJAGOPALAN: It is true. People have asked us this many times, and people have marveled at how we’ve managed to pull this off. But honestly, we managed to pull this off because so many people contributed. Forget contribution. Something other people don’t understand usually is, sometimes just a kind email or a compliment will get us through six months.

Doug Irwin acknowledging us and the project in one of his major papers or Doug Irwin writing an email to us saying, “Shruti, this is such a fantastic repository. It made my life easy,” that will carry me through, really, for six months. I think the day we got that email, Shreyas was actually floating. He was levitating in his chair. The feet were not on the ground.

It really is a public project in the sense of not just those people who’ve helped us but the people who use it. If no one used it, this would not go on for five years. It would be so depressing. All three of us are very conscious about the fact that resources are scarce and must go to the highest-valued use. If people are not using the material from this project, then why are we wasting so much money on it and time and resources? The fact that people used it. I can’t remember the exact year, but I think the one person who really nailed the whole thing together for me is Vikrant Pande.

NARLA: Oh, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: He was a doctoral student at University of Mumbai. Now, of course, he’s finished his PhD. He’s a professor, also, at University of Mumbai at one of the colleges. I have believed so strongly in the marketplace of ideas, and I’ve always felt that if we put the information out there, people will latch onto it. For us, the first proof of concept for that, as far as the 1991 Project was concerned, was Vikrant.

Again, cold email saying, “Hi, Dr. Rajagopalan. I’m so-and-so. I’m working on the ’91 projects. Can you give me some time?” Then used a big chunk of the repository towards his dissertation, which, hopefully, when he converts it into a book, we will profile on our website and things like that. But the fact that a doctoral student found this interesting and decided to use large parts of it for his book, that really pulled it together for me. That carried me on, I think, for two years almost. I was like, “OK, this is really worth doing.”

Now, there are more people who come in. Sometimes it’s going to be half a page and four footnotes. Sometimes it’s a big chunk of their doctoral work. Sometimes it’s a paper for Doug Irwin or a book that Arvind Panagariya is writing. But the fact that this project is able to enable so many excellent researchers working on what they are working on, and put it out there at a level of rigorous research and fidelity and integrity, and they don’t have to worry about, “Did I get this right or wrong?” It just makes me so happy that that exists.

NARLA: I completely agree. I think I had a different reason to levitate previously. We have another reason to levitate more recently when somebody we grew up—at least I grew up through the 2000s, looking at him, his picture in the newspaper, and the blue turban—Mr. Ahluwalia, who now I casually now reach out and chat with and workshop our papers with. He’s become such a mentor to all of us, who recently wrote to us.

The generosity is something that—it’s incomparable. In his true spirit and sense, calling us “the Library of Congress of 1991 reforms,” it feels like a reward. But it also feels like something you—oddly, all three of us, I know, feel the same way—is how much we care about this project and why it matters. I can see that in the reactions from everyone who’s used the project and the website and the archive.

We have created a public good, right? That’s really one of our main agendas of what we do as the Indian political economy program at Mercatus. This is not for just us. This is not some gatekeeping exercise. This information is for our community of researchers, people inter—anyone for that matter, for anyone who’s curious. There’s so much here to consume. 

Walking with Giants

RAJAGOPALAN: These people are just giants. I think starting with Montek and the  M Document. I’m actually egging him on to write an M Document for states. For those who’ve not read the M Document, a lot of times, reforms don’t work. After the ’91 reforms, it continued for about 15 years, and then there was a lag, or things didn’t quite work, and people started saying, “Reforms are unpopular. They don’t lead to economic growth. They don’t lead to the right things,” and so on.

What was really unique about the ’91 reforms was they didn’t look at the things in what I call a partial equilibrium. The M Doc is really a general equilibrium document. These are the six different areas which are completely shackled by this kind of License Permit Raj. There is a question about the currency. There’s a question about tariffs and opening to global markets. There’s a question, of course, about the license permit system and the price controls and the quantity controls and so on, and then large deficits. He managed to bring all of it together in one place, saying that we need to do all of this together.

If a policymaker is asked how to do this, it needs to be done in a streamlined way, but these six things go together. That’s exactly how the original reforms happen. All those five, six things happen very, very quickly. Now, when one state does a little bit of labor reform, or one state makes an amendment for a land law and things, and then nothing happens, people are like, “Oh, these reforms, it’s all nonsense, and nothing really works. We need some other model of development,” and so on.

But the truth of it is we don’t know what the binding constraint is. Sometimes when you relax one binding constraint, something else becomes the binding constraint. When you are thinking about regulatory reform or institutional reform, you need to do all of it together, but not everything together. Obviously, you can’t just upend an entire system. You need to know which are the five or six or seven things that need to go together in terms of reforms.

Montek is just such a genius when it comes to that kind of thinking. Just as a personality. Kadambari, you were there from the very first time we met him, so you know this about him. He will listen to everyone. He will listen. The first time, he will remember Ankita and Samrudha, who were interns at that time on the project. They weren’t even working full-time. Now, of course, Samrudha is a PhD student with us, and Ankita works full-time.

With you guys, with me, I’m nobody when it comes to these giants that we’re talking about. Listen to us so carefully. Actually ask us what we think should have been done at that time or what we would do differently. What we should work on now. How many times he’s encouraged the two of you to write more or to write papers. You’ll mention an idea to him, and he will say, “You should write this up and send it to me.” He shared our work with people. Just the kindness and the grace that he has shown us and our project for no good reason, other than the fact that he believes in this kind of policy community, and collegiality.

I feel very fortunate that through the project we’ve gained role models like him. The other one is, of course, Rakesh Mohan.

When I grow up, it’s Shankar Acharya, Rakesh Mohan, Montek, and Rangarajan. These are the people you hope to grow up to be just because of how they conduct themselves and also how they try to make sure that there is someone after them who has the possibility of doing the same things maybe at an even bigger scale than what they did. They don’t think of this as their big moment at all. They also don’t take much credit for it.

NARLA: Very, very true. From Dr. Acharya to Dr. Kelkar and everyone I remember, because they weren’t there exactly for those few months in ’91. Their first interjection and every word is just like, “We weren’t exactly there, so I don’t think we can say anything much about it or take any credit.” And I would always say, “But you guys have such long careers in the space, right?” But even there, they are so clear, so specific about what they claim. Yes, so true.  

SHAH: To your earlier point as well, that they’ve also been such a continued support to the project, both Mr. Ahluwalia, Dr. Mohan, and so many of the other reformers, where they’ve been mentors to us and guided us in so many different ways. They’ve reviewed papers for us. They’ve met us in the office in Arlington and in India and championed our work at different platforms. It’s not been just the oral history that they told us what they had to and then moved on, but it was just such a continued support from them throughout these five years.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. They’re like our board of advisers almost. It’s become a weird thing, but we have a very solid intellectual board of advisers for the Indian political economy program.

NARLA: Very, very true. And they share that generosity with everyone in our network, not just us, right?

SHAH: Exactly, exactly.

NARLA: Just to let you know, we were very fortunate. We had Dr. Mohan as a visiting scholar last month with us in June at Mercatus. Shruti and I, we put this table together of young PhD students across economics and political science departments in [the] DC area who are working on India. Just the time. One, we’d given him a brief on these students, but he took the time to, A, read up on them, and then with each of them at that table . . . Kadambari, I wish you were there. You should have seen how much time he spent talking to them, asking them questions, very pointed questions about their work.

RAJAGOPALAN: It was a little scary. It was like a seminar.

NARLA: A seminar. But, just devoted attention to each of them. Registered their names. Just so clear about who he’s talking to and how he should encourage them and send them on the right path and give recommendations. And then saying, “You know, send me your stuff, and I can . . ..” 

There’s a huge, huge boost to one’s confidence. I know how I was at Dr. Rangarajan’s first oral history recording. You do the research, you write the question, but to actually open your mouth and ask the question felt like the most daunting task. But, Kadambari, you and I went back a year later, and the two of us independently did our own session with him, and I was amazed at how much . . .. Sure, it’s our hard work. We’ve put in the effort. You’ve done it. But they also made us not think—this is the thing: They saw us as much as their own peers, which is such an extraordinary thing for all of them.

SHAH: Most definitely.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

NARLA: They didn’t see us as all these kids who have just come up with something to talk to them about. They saw us as peers, as thinkers, as serious researchers, and they treated us like that.

RAJAGOPALAN: They treat us like colleagues, yes.

NARLA: They treat us like colleagues.

RAJAGOPALAN: Which, I’m a little like—I still shrink into back when I’m a teenager in front of some of these people. It’s incredible to me how they are. 

They also got us extended into other parts of the project. I’m pretty sure it was Montek who told us that, “What, are you guys just obsessed with the past? Whatever was done was done, and it’s all fine, and I’m glad you’re working on it, but you really need to start putting papers out about what needs to come next.”

SHAH: Yes, exactly.

RAJAGOPALAN: He was very clear on that. Other people had told us that gently, that there’s work that remains and so on, but the clear call to action—that, “Shruti, I really like what you and your team are doing, but really, this is not enough. You guys need to take this forward”—it really came from him. 

Then when we told him that we don’t have the institutional capacity to just put out a set of papers. We need reviewers. Mercatus may have reviewers on trade, but not on other things. He just said, “I’ll review it for you.” All these people have acted as referees on papers—that’s a very time-consuming job—given excellent reports to us.

The next part of the project also came really from them saying, “Write some papers.” I also remember when we put out the first set of papers, I think we had only one. Kadambari and I had one, and Shreyas had one. Again, a few of them were like, “Why aren’t you guys writing more papers? Enough of this public good and public service! You guys have great ideas. Just write more papers.” At each point, just pushing us out there.

Where are all the Women?

SHAH: This is actually how the writing and the video series part of our website came about. The writing in particular, there’s a very clear distinction between our older essays and our newer ones. The older essays, like Shreyas and Prakhar had written on how the Rao–Singh government used the balance-of-payments crisis to create a political consensus for devaluation, for trade liberalization, industrial delicensing, and just a general push for the market reforms.

Shruti, you had written on the quest for economic freedom and how ’91 transformed a shortage-ridden, control-heavy economy into a market one with gains on growth and improved living standards, but also that there are unfinished reforms like land and labor. We had Dinyar Patel write for us on how Dadabhai Naoroji can be considered the first economic reformer. That was all the older essays.

Then we had the newer ones, which were really just—they came about from different ideas because we realized that while we are archiving the past, there are a lot of new questions that are coming up as well. One of my favorite ones is actually Uday Bhatia’s on how ’91 changed Bollywood. We had Anirudh Burman write on changing land markets. We had Renuka Sane on privatization, and a whole host of other essays.

One research question actually came from looking at the picture of the reformers, where we saw all of them, and we were wondering, “Where are the women?” because there was no woman in that picture. That became a question in itself. 

RAJAGOPALAN: You should take credit for that, Kadambari, because I didn’t wonder, “Where are the women?” I had internalized and normalized that. The person to ask, “Where are the women?” is Kadambari. I was like, “That’s a great question. I have no idea.” That’s when you took us down that rabbit hole.

SHAH: Yes, that was a rabbit hole Shreyas and I went down. We just tried to figure out who were the  female bureaucrats during, or in the lead-up to, the reforms. We really had to hunt for the names. We found them in stray footnotes and passing mentions in memoirs. Like Vandana Aggarwal, an IES officer, who later worked with Dr. Rakesh Mohan and essentially wrote the industrial policy document in the lead-up to the reforms.

There was also Renuka Viswanathan, who was at the Department for Expenditure, and later on in the Economic Affairs Department as well. Sindhushree Khullar worked with Mr. Chidambaram and later the Ministry of Finance. These were the names that we came about, and then wrote that essay on the female bureaucrats during ’91. But Shreyas also has a lovely essay on the early female liberalizers. 

NARLA: It was really from the same place of just identifying the scholars who were putting out ideas. Everyone talked about Padma Desai and Jagdish Bhagwati's book. The ones who were astute enough to have remembered their contributions always say she did the math, sure. But if you forget who contributed what is one part of it, but you also have to place these scholars in the context, the history of thought that they were contributing to. Sometimes it’s just important to reflect and write about that. That was the exercise of writing about Padma Desai, Isher Judge Ahluwalia, and Sudha Shenoy.

Sudha may not have had a direct role, so to speak, but she was still a voice of critique. She was writing consistently throughout the tenure. Their voices were out there. You’re publishing, you’re putting your material out there. Today, they are relevant. They’re important. Isher was very much in the thick of it. Maybe chose not to be in the government, but such a big voice for the reform outside. I wouldn’t use the word “proselytize,” but you had to find consensus outside.

How do you build a community of people who—how do you get that support? She had played an instrumental role there and in the research community. They were all mentors for a generation of students. What bigger an influence to have than that? To have an original thought in a world that doesn’t think like you, that’s courage. You need to reflect and acknowledge that.

I think that’s what essentially informed much of the pieces we were also writing and the way these essays were shaping. Really to think about, in a room where no one talks like you or thinks like you, how do you then show up and offer something different? 

RAJAGOPALAN: But that essay was incredible, Shreyas. It’s been reprinted in multiple places. Then people have invited us to write about Padma Desai and Isher Judge and so on. It’s become a thing of its own.

Making Economic Reforms ‘Sexy’ Again

NARLA: When you become part of the conversation, it’s—every opportunity has come because of that. One thing leads to another thing.

Something about it that really sits with me is how this is so similar to the journey of the reformers, too. They were doing something, and then they get spotted by somebody. Then their next opportunity comes along, and that just keeps building on with it. We documented this in that essay we wrote as a tribute to Dr. Manmohan Singh and his role as a talent scout. It made us think about many such folks who created avenues for the younger ones to get their next opportunity.

You may have been at the debate competition, but think about this. You’re a young economist running around DC, randomly at [the] World Bank. You’re among thousands of people. But if you get spotted by Manmohan Singh, and he makes pathways for your next career and sets your life up for opportunities.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s incredible.

NARLA: Incredible. These are the learnings and joys of being able to have written about all this and put it in one place.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Now we’ve become the go-to people. I sometimes worry. People reach out to us for obituaries. The FT, the Financial Times, asked me to write an obituary for Padma Desai.

If I remember the events correctly—and I wasn’t directly involved, so I may get a few details wrong—but I believe Martin Wolf asked Doug Irwin. Doug Irwin basically pointed him to us and said, “These guys know more about the reformers and people who had these ideas than virtually anyone else.” They asked me to write the FT obituary on Padma Desai, which wasn’t easy to put together. We were very fortunate to have had her book as a huge point of reference. Then again, when Manmohan Singh passed away—I think it would be useful to talk about that for a minute. We had asked Dr. Manmohan Singh for oral histories, and he had agreed. This is again thanks to Rangarajan and Montek putting in a good word for us. He loved the website. He saw all of it. But the first time we had asked him was during COVID, and he was really ill. We didn’t want to cause chaos because, showing up with a crew  when someone is already battling infection risk and things like that, wasn’t ideal.

Later, he just said, “I worry that my memory will be fiction. I don’t trust completely that I remember every detail. What you’ve done is amazing. Carry on.” 

He gave us his blessing, but we never recorded with him. But I also have a bittersweet feeling about it because I feel like he was right in the sense that his legacy, I’m less worried about it getting maintained. His papers are out there. 

If you guys remember, all the conversation about Manmohan Singh was about his term as prime minister. Depending on which side you’re on, favorable to Manmohan Singh or unfavorable, you picked the first or the second term to talk about. He was known more for things like the nuclear deal by the end of it, which were more recent parts of his legacy. Or the NREGA. These are the sorts of things that became his legacy as prime minister.

The reforms were this long-forgotten thing, and everyone just took it for granted. He passed away a couple of years ago. Everybody wrote about the reforms. Huge credit to us. There were major newspapers who copy-pasted our material and just put it on their front page, which is fine. It’s a public history project. It would have been nice to be acknowledged, but I don’t think of it as plagiarism. But you know that old faith that all three of us had that if you put it out there in the marketplace of ideas, people will come—if it’s easy to find, if it’s easy to search? Everybody referenced and we became the primary repository for everyone writing on Manmohan Singh.

Suddenly, the 1991 reforms and the 1991 moment, so to speak, had this huge resurgence the week he passed away. In a few years, we went from no one knowing about the reforms—young people especially, including the details, for folks like, Shreyas, you and Prakhar and others—to everyone calling for the next 1991 reforms and the 1991 moment.

I can’t say whom, because this was said in confidence, but one of the many people we have mentioned, think of the giants from the original reforms, called and told me that, “Shruti, you guys have made economic reform sexy again,” [laughs] which I found very charming. I don’t take credit for other people writing it. Of course, the credit goes to Manmohan Singh and this entire lot of people who were there.

But I do think we can take credit for the fact that we worked very hard to pull this story together, but we are not telling one version of the story. We haven’t gatekept it. We’re pulling all the material together so that many people can tell many different versions of the story, and that came through so clearly in Manmohan Singh’s many obituaries.

We wrote our own, which also was a product of the 1991 Project. Maybe you guys should talk about that.

NARLA: Yes, it was really because you had done the oral histories. Each of them had some story of the Manmohan Singh story when he spotted them at the spring meetings, when the India delegation would go. They were young professionals, or they were in some department as a young researcher, and they were spotted from Rakesh Mohan to Shankar Acharya, you name it. 

What was so it was that it was not like some one-off effort. It’s something that continued throughout. There are all these references about how when he was at Planning Commission, he brought a bunch of young people into the fold. When he was at the Finance— 

RAJAGOPALAN: Like Arvind Virmani, like Rakesh Mohan.

NARLA: Rakesh Mohan. When he was at the Finance Ministry, his relation with Montek and Isher goes all the way back. Then there are also these stories of Nitin Desai, of Urjit Patel in 1990.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, yes.

NARLA: It’s the ’90s moment. This is 1991/1992. He’s at the desk there, and he’s spotted by Manmohan Singh. That’s a relationship that he has acknowledged as well. What’s common to all of it is the underlying factor is that here was a man who has recognized not only the talent in the young ones, but has also recognized the importance of creating pathways for them, of mentoring them, of giving them free reign and backing them to do the work that they want to do. To me, those are really the choicest of qualities of a real mentor. 

That generation of people, they all have imbued that quality, and they carry it out even today.  Earlier we were talking about all these folks mentoring us and giving us a leg up. They’re all carrying that tradition forward. Somebody had to acknowledge that aspect of Manmohan Singh’s profile and journey. 

I feel very fortunate to be able to have captured that story. It was really a story less of him, but more about the individuals whose careers and journeys he shaped, and he was the common factor. Just being able to do that was very rewarding as researchers putting this archive together.

SHAH: Also, it was after the essay was published that so many people wrote with their own stories that we may not have come across yet. They were saying that, “Dr. Singh helped me in this way,” or, “He mentored me in this way,” “I met him here, and this is what he said.” Hearing all of those, it was like, we got so many emails and comments and all from different people just sharing their own stories of him. It really just speaks to his personality and what a great person he was.  

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, and the other thing is, this is a man who’s been in public service for pretty much his entire adult life in a way. There is so much that has been written about him. No one, other than us, talks about him as a fantastic talent scout.

We were the only people. The moment we said it, it became obvious. The only reason we were able to piece that story together is because we had recorded these oral histories, and we’d gone through all the expert committee reports.

He had set up so many expert committee reports and appointed the right person. He had found so many of these people as young people. My favorite story is Y.V. Reddy, where Manmohan Singh apparently used to look at the list of IAS officers who were really good at economics and who got a good rank and what they were doing. Apparently, he had never met Y.V. Reddy. Y.V. Reddy didn’t know him. It didn’t come through some other connection, but he was a really good economist.  

He said, “Yes, he shouldn’t be a district collector somewhere far away, serving a small community. He should really be brought into the economic advisory and technocracy that the Indian government has.” He was constantly inducting people and orienting people to this world, which is also why the reforms continued for so long after 1991. They stopped after 15, 20 years because all these people had moved up, and no one had bothered to cultivate that next generation of people.

Now, everyone’s like, “Oh, India has this vacuum. Where are all the technocrats? There has been brain drain. They’re all at foreign universities.” 

There was lots of brain drain then too. They all came back, but that’s because they had a pathway to coming back. So much of the—Manmohan Singh in particular, but also the broader community of reformers—so much of their story has informed our program in the sense that—you guys know this about me, I don’t like picking random initiatives and things to do just to keep busy. Our research guides our activity. We don’t do a conference because we think a conference is a good idea, or we will get to be in a nice place and meet our friends. I mean, a conference is actually a pain in the ass to run, if you really think about it. Kadambari does it, which is why I’m willing to go along with it.

But the reason we started the conferences is exactly because of what we kept hearing in the oral histories and the reformers’ story, which is reforms happen when there is a group of people who trust each other and trust each other’s expertise, because reforms are very politically risky and very reputationally costly. Which means you can’t take a random idea off the street or off the news channels or off a journal article. It needs to be an idea that has made its inroads with a lot of credibility and trust within government.

Now, how do you do that? One way of doing that is through expert committee reports where you have members within and outside government. The other way to even get the expert committee report set up is to have these people know each other. 

Because people are going to pick people they know. If you don’t know who’s an expert in labor or you don’t know who’s an expert in monetary, you don’t know who are the right committee members to pick, and you don’t know who these people are because our world is very siloed.

We started doing all our receptions and mixers for older and younger generations to intermingle, [at] our policy conference. All of this, in a way, came out of our learnings from the 1991 Project.

The Importance of Intergenerational Interaction 

NARLA: Very, very true. I somehow struggle with the idea of creating these so-called mixers and policy gatherings, so to speak, which are not even conferences. At our conference, which is Chatham House Rule-governed, we are workshopping new papers, new research. At a two-hour mixer, you are essentially chatting. I wouldn’t say it’s idle chatter, but that’s where it tends to be.

But when we put together our mixers and meetups, it was so intentional that we wanted in that room young researchers, young students. We wanted the 1991 reformers. We wanted the current lot of senior scholars to be in the room and make very deliberate introductions. “You’re an expert on this. Please talk to this person.” Just facilitating those interactions, I think you’re not doing that just on the fly. You’re really putting some thought.

RAJAGOPALAN: The IMF week mixer thing came out of Manmohan Singh’s obituary, if I remember correctly, right? So many people wrote to us that this was happening during the spring and fall meetings. We were like, “Oh, we are in DC. We’re very perfectly poised to have a gathering of people during the spring and fall meetings.” We just started doing this, and now it’s a thing that we do. Every year during the spring meetings, we have a mixer, and everyone always applauds us that it’s the one place where you can see a lot of young people who are not yet within the fold. It’s not the same old same old in-group conversation.

That, I think is a legacy that we’ve gotten from Manmohan Singh and the reformers and how they conduct themselves. At one point, I remember the very first mixer we held. There was Anne Krueger, Rakesh Mohan and Montek Singh all sitting next to each other, and I was like, “I have seen the holy trinity. This is it for me. Now I can die.” [laughter] They’re all in one table facing me, and I’m talking to them. It was really that kind of a moment for me. 

Kadambari, you are the one who actually puts these things together, especially our conference. Maybe you should talk a little bit about the conference, and then the 1991 Fellowship.

SHAH: Sure. The conference, it’s the same thought behind it, that we wanted to bring the policy community together in a way that is not the same old same old, that we have people that—there’s a huge emphasis on intergenerational dialogue. There’s a huge emphasis on getting people in a room that wouldn’t otherwise talk to each other. 

Since the first edition of the conference in 2022 in Goa, the themes have also evolved so much. It was on political economy. We had a small group of people. The conference evolved the following year, in Chennai, with 75 people on digital transformation. Last year’s conference on deregulation in Indian states, such a specific topic that people really appreciated. It was something that brought practitioners, brought academics, people from the business world, people from think tanks that don’t necessarily talk to each other on a regular basis, or wouldn’t necessarily come across each other’s work.

Just having them in the same room together, having them be part of conversations. Actually, my favorite parts of the conference are the “unconference” sessions that we have, where the participants themselves are deciding the topics. Very often, those conversations go on much longer than the actual sessions themselves, [chuckles] well beyond the time that we’ve allotted for them. I think bringing this community together and watching it evolve over the last few years, it has really been a compliment to the project itself.

Even though it’s Chatham House and all of that, we have found a way to put out some content from the conference through our video series. That also ties back into the evolution of the project that is not just asking what happened and archiving the past, but also on what reforms India needs today. Focusing on that. We did it through our writing. We did it through the conferences. We also did it through these video series that we put out that were shot on the sidelines at the conference, asking—for example, this was in the first one on India's Reform Journey Revisited, asking practitioners and scholars two questions: “What is one reform that was missed in ’91?” and, “What is one reform that is needed today?” 

Very often, the same person’s not saying the same thing for both. We had the Conversations on Deregulation come from last year’s conference, and as well as Reform in Practice, which spoke about, again, the reforms that are needed today and how deregulation can happen in Indian states. How deregulation should be thought about. What is often overlooked. How policymakers can think about it.

Again, the speakers were people from all levels of experience. While we, of course, had people like Mr. Ahluwalia, Dr. Mohan, Mr. Suman Bery, Dr. Shekhar Aiyar. We also had—there were a lot of younger people that we spoke to, like Bhuvana Anand, and Dr. Janhavi Nilekani, and Bhargavi Zaveri. Then also we had people from think tanks. We had people from the academic world, bureaucrats. We had all sorts of people come together for this. I think that that’s ultimately one of my favorite parts, that we take the conference room to anyone’s screen, essentially.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. No, and this is kudos to you, Kadambari, because you guys know this about me. I hate conferences and I hate video. Because my thing with video is, like, “I can read faster than you can speak. Why am I watching this nonsense?” I’m very reluctant to do this, but you guys have dragged me into the new age, saying, “No, you must do video. We must make things more accessible. Everyone doesn’t have a PhD.”

Also at the conference, people have such specific domain expertise. Even we learn from each other sometimes through informal conversation and video, because we’ve not read everyone’s detailed papers in health economics or something like that.

It’s such a nice thing that we’re able to get an entry point, which is a little bit more informal and accessible, and then we can go into that rabbit hole if we want to do it. The video series has been great. My experience with the video series started with, of course, a Talking Trade series with Arvind Panagariya, which was a masterclass. I was just fly on the wall.

I could ask him a few questions. He’s a walking repository of trade theory, trade history, trade empirics, and history of economic thought, all of it together. The man has an absolute encyclopedic knowledge on all these things. We’ve done a series of, what, eight episodes with him at about 75 to 90 minutes each? I was literally in a one-on-one seminar with Arvind Panagariya, which has been one of the great fortunes of my life. 

That kind of video, I’ve always been a little bit more open to. But I think you guys are the ones who told me that, no, the short-form video is great because it’s an entry point. Not because the world doesn’t have attention spans. I don’t believe that. It’s not because people don’t read. We’re in a community full of very brilliant young people, but it’s really about the entry point. Do I know this person? Can I get a feel for how passionate they are about their idea and why it matters and the context building around it?

NARLA: Speaking of videos, Kadambari, we have set up an archival public repository. We have done so much of outreach work. We are really disseminating ideas. Within that spirit of disseminating ideas, we are now also, at the end of the day, researchers, and our main job is to now think about the new lines of inquiry, the future ideas, the next stage of reforms, and working on it. We’ve been writing papers on a variety of topics. We did the whole policy paper series, and you are at the helm of running that project. Do tell us more about that.

SHAH: We’re just picking up from the same idea that led to the writing section on the website, the video series, and so on: What is the next set of reforms that we need to look at going forward? The policy paper series stemmed from that idea itself, where we wrote papers among the team, but also commissioned papers from outside, because we wanted to get an idea about what reforms are yet to be done. The world looks very different today than it did in ’91, which means that the reforms needed today are different from what was needed then.

We were very lucky to get great scholars in their fields to tell us what we should be doing. We had Shreyas, of course, on India’s competition law and the risks of being anti-big or anti-scale in ways that hurt growth and consumers. Dr. Arvind Panagariya wrote on India’s trade policy and the case for returning to a more liberal trade regime. We had Amartya Lahiri and Devashish Mitra writing on India’s central development challenge, creating productive jobs through labor-intensive manufacturing and exports.

Sarthak Pradhan and Pranay Kotasthane wrote on India’s climb up the innovation ladder and the policy barriers that still hold back Indian firms. Pravin Krishna wrote on India’s trade agreements and whether they have actually worked as a serious trade strategy. Shruti and I wrote on how India’s labor laws prevent firms from scaling and discourage them from hiring more workers. Ankita Dinkar and Samrudha Surana wrote on electricity challenges faced by Indian manufacturers, like unreliable power, high tariffs, and barriers to open access.

RAJAGOPALAN: We started this two years ago and look at how relevant everything became, from the trade war to semiconductor and growing our R&D. Somehow we were poised. We could see this coming, and we put out papers.

SHAH: Exactly.

NARLA: And the effort continues, right? These were, of course, all looking at issues at the union level, so to speak. You are talking about trade and this thing, but electricity has much more resonance also at the state policy level. This is a common chatter. We experienced this at the Ideas of India conference in Bangalore last year, and the conversations thereafter, especially in light of the deregulation agenda, is we’ve all looked at the union level. We have all looked at what could be done, but the interest now is at the state list of the constitution and how do we go about thinking about reforms at the state level.

We’ve been working on our land series, and we wrote one and published on land use conversion laws, and just the multiplicity of regulatory overload there and how that gets in the way of making land accessible easily for different uses without having to go through different loops just to do something and make the most of your land. Continuing on that trajectory of building work on that. But this requires extreme effort because you are trying to study 20, 21 states whose laws are accessible, going through those documents, notifications, circulars. It’s the three of us and Ankita and our team and a few of our collaborators.

RAJAGOPALAN: Ankit Bhatia who has written a couple of the papers with us, but that I somehow find still to be easier, Shreyas. The thing that Kadambari is talking about, which is getting outside people to write and then get it peer-reviewed and shepherd that project start to finish, is a big one. To do any paper series, actually.

NARLA: Very right, Shruti. You’re coordinating across so many different people.

RAJAGOPALAN: The internal team works in a fairly frictionless way.

NARLA: Yes, yes, that is true. That is true. Not so much the states we’re trying to study.

RAJAGOPALAN: [laughter] Unlike the states. Kadambari, what is on the docket for the papers?

SHAH: Actually, the next big step for us is that we have launched the 1991 Fellowship, speaking of how hard it is to get people to write, and especially from the outside, but also to find people who are working on these ideas. The ’91 Fellowship is your brainchild, Shruti. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Incubating New Talent

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. This is also directly related to what we are doing with the paper series, but it became crystal clear to us while doing the 1991 Project that a lot of the macro stability, currency-related, monetary, and fiscal side of the reforms were all done at the union level. We’ve done a lot of work there, and also the worst has been crossed. We’ve already seen that this year. We had another balance-of-payments stress, but it didn’t turn into a crisis. A lot of the reforms that were done 30, 35 years ago, they’ve actually held us in very good stead. 

Now, what remains to be done is almost all state-level subjects. Shreyas and I come from a legal background. We have the state list, the union list, and the concurrent list. Labor, of course, is a big area on the concurrent list, but a lot of the land, agriculture, energy policy, all of this needs to be done at the state level. 

There were two things happening. One is, most people don’t think of state-level reforms as the cool thing to work on, so that’s one kind of problem. But I think that number is increasing. Slowly, but steadily, there are more and more people working at state-level policy.

But the second problem is anytime we talk to people, whether it’s the think tank community or someone else, and we see the next stage is really state-level policy and what are you doing about it, they say, “Oh, we’d love to do something on it, but where’s the talent?” 

I’ve heard this lament for 20 years. I’ve been in this business and in these circles for a really long time. Twenty years ago, I didn’t know anyone who could tell me anything about Odisha’s energy policy. Twenty years have passed, and there are still not too many people.

Mercatus has a very, very clear vision and mission, which is classical liberal ideas, but ideas don’t live in the air; they’re incubated in individuals and networks. Really, the Mercatus approach to all of this is, “Can we find and incubate the talent?” Mercatus has hundreds of fellows. This is from high school level, undergrad, masters, PhDs, postdocs, professors, also the Emergent Ventures fellows, policy fellows. We really have them at each level.

We have just on the academic side of things, about 600 to 800 fellows every year at Mercatus through various programs. The idea that I landed on in a very obvious way, just because of where we are and where I come from is, we need to figure out the state-level policy talent, and we need to incubate it. 

What we started was the 1991 Fellowship. This is basically for young people working on any one or, say, two policy areas at the state level. They can pick the policy areas they’re working on, they can pick the states they’re working on, and we incubate them for a period of three years. You do need a couple of years to build a lot of specialization context and domain knowledge. I have no doubt that these guys will do great in the world. So, we put out a call for—all this started and got wrapped up pretty quickly. We hatched this idea last year in October. We launched the fellowship in January. We announced the fellows last month, and they’re off.

We’ve already done their orientation. In the last couple of weeks, they’ve gone back to their respective states, and they’re off on their own working on their cool projects. We also tend to do things pretty quickly at Mercatus. Once we decide something is important, we do it. I think of the 1991 Fellowship very much as proof of concept that the talent exists out there. If we can back them with institutional support and financial support and incubation and network them across a broader policy community, we will get great results at the state level. I have no doubt.

I don’t want another 20 years to pass for the same lament that there aren’t enough young people working at the state level that we can just hire. I’ve taken it upon myself that we will solve this problem. Of course, you guys are very involved in designing the fellowship, picking the fellows, interviewing them, the orientation, all of it. Ankita Dinkar, our colleague, who’s not with us on this podcast, is the program manager because she’s literally running this program in New Delhi right now with them. But that’s basically the idea of the fellowship.

We have 12 fantastic young fellows. They come from different domains. They come from 10 different states. We’ve covered a huge number of areas as well as states. About half of India lives in these states is the way I like to put it. I have no doubt that they’ll all go on to have very, very good policy careers, because everything depends on the talent. Now, how much of the reforms happen is a matter of timing and chance and political viability and all of those things. The Overton window needs to be there and shifted already in place, and there needs to be a moment when it can happen.

But to keep the powder ready, as we’ve learned from the 1991 reformers, is to do this hard work of finding the people, incubating them, and making sure that they have all the resources, connections, and networks to really do what needs to be done so that India and Indians can become very rich, which is pretty much the only goal I have.

And also makes Kadambari’s life so much simpler, right? Now, Kadambari, there are 12 people who are working exactly on reform ideas. Hopefully, that’s a steady stream of very cool papers that you can midwife onto the 1991 Project as the next part of the project.

SHAH: Most definitely. The project, my hope is that it grows with more papers, more videos, more oral histories. At the end of the day, this project has always been and will continue to be a community-led project. 

If anyone listening has an idea that they’d like to write about, or something they’d like to share on the oral histories, or something that they’d like us to add to the public repository, I would highly encourage them to reach out to us. We’ll see what we can do to take it forward.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, and even if there are corrections to be made, actually, I would encourage all of it.

SHAH: Yes. Most definitely.

RAJAGOPALAN: If you’ve gotten something wrong, this is a huge project spanning lots of years and lots of people. All of that is welcome. New ideas are welcome. You don’t need to have any credentials to start writing on state-level reforms, I think. Don’t worry about editorial support. These are all the things the project will provide. What we really need are ideas coming from the local context.

Because we hate the idea of exporting best practices from the First World to India or from Tamil Nadu to Bengal. We need ideas to be highly contextual, highly local, and trying to solve the problem that’s actually constraining that particular economy. I think that’s our bigger effort. 

I hope this goes in amazing places. 

Gratitude and Acknowledgments

NARLA: I can start off thanking everyone who was a big support and part of the oral history project itself. Because that has taken a good five years of putting it together, and really thinking through from everyone from K.P. Krishnan, Ajay Shah, Dr. Kelkar, Niranjan for just helping us with the ideas and framework and getting started on it. I mentioned about Nona Storr and Ryan Perkins and everyone we interacted to get the feedback on. It’s strange to thank Prakhar because I feel like he’s still part of us and our group, even though he’s not with the team officially. For just really setting up the ground and getting us started with the whole oral histories project as well. And, of course— 

RAJAGOPALAN: Then abandoning us so effectively to go do doctorate research. [laughter]

NARLA: Yes, but still being a sounding board for us.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, I’m teasing. I’m so thrilled he was there at the beginning to help us get started.

NARLA: Absolutely, absolutely. Of course, every person who was instrumental in just doing the backend effort in making each recording possible. We had Dallas in-house when we recorded some of the oral histories at the Mercatus office. On the ground, everybody from Gaurav Chintamani, who sent his students, like Anshul Jain and Prakhar Yadav, who were very helpful in doing the oral histories in India. There was Saurabh Mishra along the way. Just everybody coming together and helping us with these oral histories. There was Varun in Chennai, who was wonderful when we recorded with Dr. Rangarajan. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Anand Krishnamoorthi, like the other ones who help us set all of that up.

NARLA: Of course, each of them really coming forth and sending their teams, and they’re helping us really one step at a time building on. Then we had help with the transcripts, because once we had all the material, then to— 

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, my god, that is a mountain to climb to clean up 50-plus hours of oral history transcripts.

NARLA: Exactly. Really keeping it clean and making sure every word is heard and clear. We had a lot of help from Mary Horan, who I think did the larger chunk of those transcripts. Then our, well, now former intern, but soon to be research fellow at Mercatus, Aakrith Harikumar, who took the pains to just go over those transcripts and giving it another scrub. Really helpful.

Giving this institutional legitimacywere obviously, of course, folks at Mercatus but also our legal team, Rakshanda Deka and Pradyuman Kaistha, who really created the legal framework of how we are recording these materials, the copyright, and how it will be shared with the interviewees that we got on board. Just creating that institutional apparatus to do the oral history work. How can we not thank the people who participated— 

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, my god. Yes. Yes, the people were amazing.

NARLA: Exactly. Dr. Rangarajan, Dr. Vijay Kelkar, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Dr. Shankar Acharya, Dr. Rakesh Mohan, P. Chidambaram, Dr. Ashok Desai, Jairam Ramesh, Martin Wolf, who you recorded with, Narayan Murthy, Tarun Das. All of them just so generously speaking to us. Obviously, the ones who made the connections, particularly Karti Sandilya.

Sending out those emails for us and putting us in touch and making all of this come together.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. We have a few more scheduled. Hopefully they’ll happen when they happen.

NARLA: When they happen. We’ll take it from there. But now we have a tribe. We have people backing us up, and, I think, what more can we ask for?

SHAH: It’s not just the oral history. We have so many people to thank for the entire project as well. In terms of the website, in the early days, Maged really helped us get Version 1 up. For Version 2, Somesh and Arvind were both EV winners. They also helped us get this version up. Then, of course, all the teams at Mercatus that help us keep it going: the IT team, Jeff Holmes, and Ashley Webb.

The strategic engagement team, as well, just in terms of—whether it’s the fellowship, whether it’s something for the project, they’re always so ready to help us. The publications team that gets our writing into shape and makes sure that there are no typos and that we are following all the guidelines that we’re supposed to. For our conferences, the events team, and Ashley Schiller, and of course our partners in the conference, Nilekani Philanthropies and Dr. Janhavi Nilekani having—we would not be able to do any of the things that we do without these people. Of course, everyone who attended our conferences as well over the years.

The writing section of the website also would not have come about if people had not been so ready to share their ideas. We've had essays from, of course, Shreyas and Prakhar and Shruti from the team, but also from Dinyar Patel, Anupam Manur, Anirudh Burman, Uday Bhatia, Renuka Sane, Ovi Karva, Sahil Deo, Shambhavi Joshi, Aditi Bhowmick, Samridhi Agarwal. 

SHAH: Samridhi, Bhargavi Zaveri, Jayat Joshi, Shahid Mohammad Lone, Harini Subramanian, Zerick Dastur, and everyone who contributed to our paper series as well, which was the team, of course. Also Dr. Arvind Panagariya, Amartya Lahiri, Devashish Mitra, Sarthak Pradhan, Pranay Kotasthane, Pravin Krishna. In addition to our writing the video series over the years, which has grown into multiple series now. With India's Reform Journey  revisited, we had Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Narayan Ramachandran, Janhavi Nilekani, Amit Varma, Pritika Hingorani, Manish Sabharwal, Mohit Satyanand, Bhargavi Zaveri, Shubho Roy, Vidya Mahambare, Ajay Shah, Anupam Manur, Saon Ray, M.R. Madhavan, Mahima Vashisht, KP Krishnan, Bhuvana Anand, Neelanjan Sircar, Suyash Rai, and of course Shruti in the series as well.

In Bangalore last year, we shot three new series, which included India's Reforms in Practice, which featured Sumita Dawra, Sowmya Dhanraj, Bhuvana Anand, Laveesh Bhandari, Prabhat Kumar, Chakshu Roy, Siddharth Raman, Shekhar Aiyar, Rahul Ahluwalia, Rahul Tongia, Alok Kumar, Karan Nagpal, Sarthak Pradhan, Rohit Chandra, Praveen Ravi, Amartya Lahiri, Prachi Mishra, Tanuj Bhojwani, Janhavi Nilekani, Prashant Narang, Kshitij Batra, Luis Miranda, Manjushree RM, Anirudh Burman, Vishal Tripathi, and Shreyas and myself. We had a series on Conversations on Deregulation featuring Manish Sabharwal, M.R. Madhavan, Rakesh Mohan, Suman Bery, Amit Varma, and Montek Singh Ahluwalia.

And an exciting series on Book Spotlight where we featured people who have written [02:06:00] books to talk about why they wrote the book, what they want readers to take away, and the ideas that they explored. We had Akshay Jaitly, Rahul Bajoria, Rukmini S., Ajit Ranade, Pranay Kotasthane, Vinay Sitapati, Arvind Subramanian, Karthik Muralidharan, Rajeev Mantri, Saon Ray, M.R. Sharan, and Nitin Pai in that series. 

We also had a couple of webinars that we did, and Doug Irwin, Arvind Panagariya, Shruti, and Larry White spoke on Dr. Panagariya's recent book, The Nehru Development Model: History and Its Lasting Impact.

We have everybody to thank for this, and Dr. Panagariya for his time and generosity in shooting the Talking Trade series with us as well.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, we’ve also met new people along the way. Nomsita and Vaishnav, who are recording this video for us, too— 

SHAH: Absolutely.

RAJAGOPALAN: —have recently joined this tribe. The other part of it is when you were reading out that list of names, I’ve known many of them for a long time, but there are so many new people, and that’s what makes me happiest about this community. That our interns have now become doctoral students or joined policy places or are working on this full-time, and that makes me really, really happy. It takes a village, but a big part of it taking a village is also making the village, and I think that’s what the 1991 Project is all about. How do we create that community to keep this going.

NARLA: Very, very true, and when you have sounding boards like Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, Amit Varma, and Prem Panicker, how can you go wrong?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. We’ve had very, very good mentors. We’ve been so fortunate. The biggest cheerleaders within Mercatus, of course, Daniel Rothschild, when we first started, he was just like, “Let’s get this up and running.” Now Ben Klutsey. Tyler and Pete Boettke, of course, have always been great advisers to us on everything that we touch. It’s been remarkable to do this.

RAJAGOPALAN: My biggest thanks to the both of you.

NARLA: No, I’m also grateful for professors who are listing our materials in their classrooms for reading.

SHAH: Exactly. Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, and that came from Kinshu Dang. I don’t know if he mentioned Kinshu yet, but she was the first one to say that there’s a demand for this from students in colleges and econ clubs.

Because we were getting all these messages, and we didn’t know what to do. Kinshu was like, “Hey, I think we need to address this.” She was the one who started the newsletter, going to all these econ clubs who reached out to us, and that’s how it got into reading groups and curricula and so on.

NARLA: Yeah, so true. And now we receive applications from those students.

SHAH: Yes, in terms of supporting the project also, Keelan who helps us with everything and troubleshooting everything that we need. We really wouldn’t be able to do this without him.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Keelan runs our life, so yes. [laughter] He keeps everything going, not just the 1991 Project. No, big shout-out to all of you. The core team is pretty small, as everyone has heard many times. It’s Shreyas, Kadambari, and Ankita Dinkar who are really the full-time people on the team, and then everyone else at Mercatus or outside who comes in and helps us with special projects. 

All of this became worthwhile as people started reading and researching and really reaffirmed our faith that if you put things out there, there are enough people who are interested and involved and enough people who care about good research, that they will come. That’s been validated now many times over in the past five years. I’m very grateful to both of you, not just for working on this project, but for also taking time to do this podcast in the middle of crazy, very delayed, but now suddenly, very heavy monsoons in India and with all our internet and tech troubles and so on. Thank you so much for doing this, and thank you for coming back on Ideas of India.

NARLA: Thank you so much, Shruti. Thank you for leading the way, truly.

SHAH: Thank you. Yes, and this project wouldn’t exist without you, so thank you for giving us all the support that we need to make it happen and work on it and all the ideas that you give us for it. Just you really lead this project, and we thank you for that. Thank you for having us on the podcast as well.

NARLA: And the mentorship, and the mentorship, as always.

SHAH: Oh, that goes without saying.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, that? You know what I say, right? The ideas aren’t the work. I’m like "gyaan is muft." Now, I'm happy to give the gyaan and the idea. Someone has to do the work, which is always the hard part. What is scarce is people who are willing to do the work.

NARLA: Yes. Thank you, guys. What a privilege.

SHAH: Thank you.

RAJAGOPALAN: Thanks so much. See you guys soon in the office.