The past week has seen several tributes pouring in for the distinguished economist TN Srinivasan, who passed away in Chennai on November 11 at the age of 85. Besides the intellectual support and credibility he extended to the country’s 1991 economic reforms, the homages highlight his varied and enduring contributions to economic research and public policy over the past six decades.

My own association with TN, as friends and colleagues called him, was memorable despite being brief and towards the fag end of his illustrious career. We became colleagues at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore (NUS), when he took up a two-year visiting professorship in early 2011 after retiring from Yale. We had offices opposite each other, lived in the same housing complex, frequently commuted together and became family friends.

I am a non-economist and our conversations initially were mostly about our ancestral district in Tamil Nadu. TN regaled me with fascinating accounts of life and culture in the Thanjavur district of the 1940s and 1950s, especially the temple towns of Kumbakonam and Mannargudi, where he grew up and completed schooling. That explains his abiding interest in temple history, architecture, Carnatic music, and fondness for South Indian filter coffee.

It was the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident that gave me an opportunity to write a joint paper with him. In the days and weeks after the unprecedented disaster shook Japan, TN would regularly drop into my office to discuss the ensuing international developments, armed with copies of interesting news articles on the subject. Over the next several months, we continued to discuss various nuclear technology and policy issues. These discussions crystallised into an op-ed we wrote for The Hindu jointly with Surya Sethi, another colleague who was earlier the advisor on energy and climate policy at the erstwhile Planning Commission.

After this, TN prompted me to work on a longer article for a peer-reviewed journal to provide a broader perspective and framework to assess the impact of the Fukushima accident on the future of nuclear power development in general and India in particular, against the backdrop of the massive public resistance to the Kudankulam nuclear power project in Tamil Nadu. This paper took me a long time to write since it had to meet the exacting standards of TN, and I lost track of the number of revisions he asked for.

My two years of association with TN in Singapore greatly enriched my thinking on nuclear policy issues, an area I specialised in as a graduate student in nuclear engineering. His familiarity with the technical issues related to nuclear policy came from the papers he wrote jointly with engineers while visiting Austria’s International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) many years ago, on the growth scenarios for nuclear power. Besides the learning, it was a humbling experience for me to engage with TN’s sharp mind and the breadth and sophistication of his scholarship.

Academician Azad Bali, who wrote two papers jointly with him in recent years on social policy and income inequality in India, says he “learned more through that experience than all of grad school put together”. Postdoctoral researcher Soundarya Iyer, who provided TN research support for his 2016 public lecture in Bengaluru on caste dynamics in memory of the sociologist MN Srinivas, fondly recalls the interest he took in her doctoral work on rural transformation in Karnataka and his extensive written comments on a paper she wrote. There are several such instances of the active role TN played till the end in fostering the intellectual well-being of young researchers.

The only area where he lagged behind younger colleagues was in the use of digital technology. TN belonged to another era and wrote in longhand; he was quite clumsy at using computers.

When TN neared the end of his two-year professorship in NUS the entire doctoral student cohort had, in an unprecedented move, petitioned authorities to retain him longer. He brought considerable analytical rigour in teaching research methods for doctoral students as well as in the elective courses he taught in public policy. He could be a merciless and unsparing critic of colleagues’ work at research seminars and had very low tolerance for mediocrity and analytical lapses. But he was also generous with time for students and colleagues who sought his advice, and always kind and gentle in his interactions.

Former Union minister Jairam Ramesh’s tweet was one of the best tributes in memoriam to TN: “He never craved for public recognition and was immersed in the world of scholarship till the very end.” Those who have known TN personally and professionally will wholeheartedly agree.

TS Gopi Rethinaraj is a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Public Policy, Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW