Nand Kishore Singh

Easily accessible and perhaps too open

Nand Kishore Singh, the revenue secretary in the finance ministry, has probably unlearned much of what he had learnt when he did his Masters from the Delhi School of Economics about three decades ago.

His stint in the finance ministry -- first as additional secretary in the department of economic affairs handling multilateral funding agencies, then as expenditure secretary and now as revenue secretary -- will certainly have brought home the fact that at the decision-making level, politics has a tendency to take precedence over economics.

Flamboyant and one of the most easily accessed bureaucrats in the Indian government, Singh had to face a whiff of trouble over the government's expenditure policy announcement last year. Not all the measures were to have been made public -- a measure of caution the H D Deve Gowda government hoped would forestall criticism from the United Front partners.

He was perhaps a little too open about the contents of the austerity plan -- an openness that has some of the United Front partners up in arms and has brought a frown to Finance Minister P Chidambaram's face.

Singh joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1964. After an initial stint in his home state of Bihar, he moved to the commerce ministry at the Centre in 1969, first as undersecretary handling GATT and Unctad negotiations and later as a special assistant to the then commerce minister again dealing primarily with GATT and Unctad.

Subsequently, after a three-year stint in his home state, Singh was the minister (economic and commercial) at the Indian embassy in Tokyo for four years. He once again returned to his home state before moving as a joint secretary to the finance ministry in 1991. He has been with the ministry since.

The Budget Makers