R aja Jesudoss Chelliah, a renowned economist, the doyen among Indi- an public finance schol- ars, the architect of tax reforms in the country is no more. He passed away on April 7, in Chen- nai after a brief period of illness. With his passing away, we have lost a peer, a scholar of eminence, a pas- sionate reformer, an institutional builder and, above all, a genial hu- man being. The National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) has lost its founder and many in the institute feel a personal loss. There is hardly anyone in the country today who has done so much for the cause of public finance teaching, research and reform and his passing away truly marks end of an era. After graduating from the Uni- versity of Pittsburgh, Dr Chelliah was in the National Council of Ap- plied Economics Research (NCAER) for a short period where he worked on economic and functional clas- sification of the budgets. He then moved on to the Rajasthan and Os- mania universities, before joining the International Monetary Fund (IMF) where he rose to become the Chief of the Fiscal Analysis Divi- sion in the Fiscal Affairs Depart- ment of the Fund. Convinced that there is much to be done back in In- dia to redesign the architecture, en- gineering and management aspects of fiscal policy, at the behest of the then Finance Minister C Subra- manian, Dr Chelliah returned to In- dia and started the NIPFP as a think tank to work closely with the Min- istry of Finance, while remaining autonomous. The institute was start- ed in a small room in the Planning Commission in 1976 with Dr Pulin Nayak being one of the earliest re- cruits. The strong foundation he laid and the tradition of policy re- search he established, has contin- ued to shape the institution as a pre- mier think tank on fiscal policy. Con- cerned about the quality of teach- ing and research in the universities in the southern part of the country, he started the Madras School of Economics, and nursed it from in- fancy to maturity. Very few peo- ple will have the stamina and courage to start an institution after the age of 70, but Dr Chelliah was different. He successfully nursed it as a rare institution of excellence in teaching, particularly in areas such as environmental economics, financial economics and actuarial economics. Dr Raja Chelliah belonged to the rare breed of economists in the country who made tremendous con- tribution to applied research in pub- lic finance and provided strong an- alytical underpinning for fiscal pol- icy calibration. From his seminal work on Fiscal Policy in Underde- veloped Coun- tries in 1960, in which he ex- pounded the fundamental problems of cal- ibrating fiscal policy in under- developed coun- tries, he went on to do research on a variety of issues ranging from the profound to the utterly practical. The above book is still a classic and is widely- used as a learning tool by students and policymakers alike all over the developing world. In a carrier span- ning almost 60 years, Dr Chelliah undertook his research on theo- retical and policy issues on subjects such as concept of budget deficit, tax policy and reforms, allocative and technical efficiency in public spending, sustainability of public debt in India and intergovernmen- tal finance. His focus was not con- fined to fiscal policy issues alone; he put together an important book on Income, Poverty and Be- yond, and was presently en- gaged in com- pleting a study on regional eq- uity. Perhaps, no other economist in India has made as much con- tribution to the fiscal policy debate as Dr Chelliah has. His contribu- tion to the design and implemen- tation of tax reforms in India is par- ticularly notable. He was the main architect of the tax reforms pro- gramme when the Government of India embarked on economic re- forms in 1991. In fact, the Tax Re- forms Committee (TRC) and the Commission on Financial Sector Reforms (chaired by Narasimham) were the first two commissions set up when the economic reform pro- gramme was initiated by the then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh. Dr Chelliah served as member and chairman of several committees and commissions appointed by the Gov- ernment of India and various state governments. He was a member of the Economic Administration Re- forms Commission, Indirect Tax- ation Enquiry Committee, Planning Commission, Ninth Finance Com- mission and Fiscal Adviser to the Finance Minister. As a Chairman of the TRC, Dr Chelliah prepared the blueprint for tax reforms for the country, and it goes to the credit of Manmohan Singh that he appoint- ed Dr Chelliah as fiscal advisor to the finance minister to implement the recommendations. His sphere of policy influence was not confined to India alone. He was appointed as the chairman of the Tax Reforms Commission in Zimbabwe (1984- 85) and was called upon to advise the Financial and Fiscal Commis- sion in South Africa. He undertook one of the earliest studies on fiscal devolution in Sri Lanka as well. Dr Chelliah was not merely a policymaker, but also an acade- mician of great standing. His basic study on Fiscal Policy in Under- developed Countries is, perhaps, the most profound contribution deal- ing with the problems of fiscal pol- icy formulation in developing coun- tries. The conceptual work he car- ried out at the IMF on alternative concepts of budget deficits provides rare insights into the dynamics of debt, deficits and economic growth. His study on trends in taxation in developing countries is one of the most widely-referred articles in pub- lic finance. He laid enormous im- portance not merely to what was written but also to how it was writ- ten. The focus always was com- municating to the common man, and generations of public finance scholars have learnt this art from him. For me, he was always a teacher and an adviser and I had the distinction of co-authoring a book with him on Trends and Issues in Indian Federal Finance (1981) in early part of my carrier and we also published the Survey of Re- search in Indian Fiscal Federal- ism (1996) for the Indian Council of Social Science Research. We, at NIPFP, will surely miss his guid- ance, and the public finance schol- ars in the country will miss a schol- ar and a critique. The author is director, NIPFP Raja Chelliah: Father of India’s tax reforms He’ll be remembered for conceptualising and implementing India’s tax reforms, even as his early books on fiscal policy are still widely referred to, says M Govinda Rao Few people have the courage to start something new when they’re 70 years old, but that’s what Chelliah did when he set up the Madras School of Economics PORTRAIT: BINAY SINHA