Missing Elements

This is a festschrift. The book does not use the word, though. It uses the more pedestrian ‘Essays in Honour of C. Rangarajan’. Festschrift is used in the Prime Minister’s foreword, though, where the PM talks about Rangarajan’s contributions at the Planning Commission, the Reserve Bank of India, 12th Finance Commission and the Economic Advisory Council. Rangarajan needs no introduction. That said, if you plan a festschrift, you need a very good introduction on the person’s contributions to intellectual debate and policy formulation. You also probably have a bibliography of his academic writings. These elements are missing in this volume. A festschrift should also try to capture perspectives from the various spheres and entities the scholar has influenced or associated with. In this case, it should have tried to capture the Planning Commission, Finance Commission and the Economic Advisory Council angles too. But there is not much on that front.

There is an impressive cast — S.S. Tarapore, K. Kanagasabapathy, Balamurali Radhakrishnan, Raghbendra Jha, Joseph Massey, D. Subbarao, Y.V. Reddy, Swayam Prava Mishra, Shyamala Gopinath, Ravi Parthasarathy, Madhu Kannan, Kartikeya Desai and Nitin Desai, K.G. Karmakar, K.C. Chakrabarty, Udaibir Das, Ravi Narain, Ashima Goyal and Kirit Parikh...............

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