Ashok K. Lahiri

Those Were the Days: Tales from the 15th Finance Commission Ashok K. Lahiri

The Finance Commission has played a critical role in India's federal

structure since 1952. Every five years, this constitutional body produces a

report recommending what share of the Union Government's divisible tax

pool should be devolved to the states, and how this aggregate should be

distributed among the different states, among other recommendations on

fiscal governance. In between its appointment and submission of its Report,

the Finance Commission tends to spend the intervening period in the

relative secrecy of internal discussions and state visits. Despite the excitement

about the Commissions in the media, and among the public, leaders and

bureaucrats in states, little is publicly known about the rich experiences

that the members and staff of the Commission gain while visiting all the

states of our large and diverse country, and their interpersonal interactions.

Those Were the Days captures vignettes of such experiences of the 15th

Finance Commission. It is a book not of history or economics or even

secret deliberations within the Commission, but one that captures the joys

of working as a team, a sense of discovery of the unity in diversity that

is India and the great camaraderie that it enjoyed with leaders and civil

servants in the different states.