On the Fringes of Government: A Personal Journey

This autobiography deals with the events in the life of the author who is relatively an unknown entity but who, in a span of five decades of public service in India and abroad, worked as a faculty member of university, an official of Government of India, a consultant with Ford Foundation (India) and a staff member of International Monetary Fund (for nearly three decades). Although pegged to the chronological events in the author’s life, the book is devoted more to delineation of the contemporary political, social and economic events that had an immense influence on the patterns of life in general, and on the author’s life in particular. He was not a participant in these events, but as a keen observer, with the worm’s eye view, he presents a graphic and moving account of rural life in coastal Andhra during the last stages of British era, and of political events that shaped ordinary lives. The second and concluding parts of the books are devoted to a discussion of how government bureaucracies work (or, for the most part, do not work), how they are in a state of self-denial in the recognition of impending problems, how they evolve policy packages in the thirteenth hour, and how the revealed or hidden social preferences of policy-makers mould policies and rationalize their failures.