Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian on Thursday criticised the rating agencies for favouring China even though its growth was lower than India’s.

Rating agencies have given higher rating to China because they want to do more business in China, said Subramanian while delivering the Dr VKRV Memorial lecture on ‘Competence, Truth and Power: Macro-economic Commentary in India’, here.

He said the social media has encouraged the academics in the US and in the UK to enter into a healthy macro-economic policy discussion but “in India, while social media is as omnipresent as elsewhere, it has not become a forum for serious macroeconomic debates.”

Subramanian said the country requires diversity of opinion. “That diversity will require both competence and capability. It will require voices that are not silenced, compromised, or conveniently moderated by the lure or fear of power.”

Urging academics to participate in debates, he said, “We want wider and critical debate on the government policies.” And further said the public interest is better served by richer debate that encompasses critical views, including of officialdom.

However, experts stay on the right side of power. “Before policy decisions are announced experts tend to express the views they think officials are likely to take. After policy actions, they try hard to endorse the decisions already taken. As a result, we in the government do not really benefit from their wisdom. This is a serious problem, because high-quality policy-making demands high quality inputs and high quality debates,” he said.

Subramanian said all officialdom wanted validation of their actions/policy decisions. “There is a clear relationship between expert analysis and official decisions. Before policy decisions, the expert analysis is often illuminating. But once the decisions are taken, it is truly striking how the tune and tone of the analysis changes. Analysts fall backwards to rationalize the official decision”.

‘Self censorship’

He claimed that experts often hold back their objective assessment. Instead, they censor themselves, and in public fora are insufficiently critical and independent of officialdom — whether the officials are in Mumbai or Delhi.

“Instead of criticising the official decisions, as consistency would demand, analysts find ex-post logic to attribute merit to government decisions, particularly the RBI for holding rates constant over the past three announcements,” he said.

Highlighting decline in the quality of higher education across the board in the country, Subramanian said, “We need more disinterested voices — especially universities and independent researchers that are distant from and not dependent upon the apparatus of power — to speak up.”

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