The Bibek I knew

It was the early 2000s when I was setting up an economics research practice.

- LAVEESH BHANDARI

Driven by necessity I was knocking door to door for work. On my brother's reference, I called Bibek Debroy for outsourced research. He spoke to me for all of five minutes and offered to give me some data work ranking the states of India. The Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies (RGICS) would publish it and Bibek and I would co-author it. And he would give me some advance and the rest on completion. We had a meeting soon after and figured out a methodology and variables and structure, etc. And I was out of his office in just 15 minutes. A few weeks later I was back in his office with printouts of state-level data. Gujarat was coming on top in my ranking. I had validated the numbers, the sources, and the methods, and had even done sensitivity analyses. There were no mistakes there.

The questions on my mind were: Will Bibek ask me to change the method, or the weighting schema? Would he remove his name from this study? Or would he ask me to abandon the study? How could the head of the RGICS co-author a paper ranking post-Godhra Gujarat as the topmost? Again it took Bibek all of 15 minutes, or perhaps it was 10, to clear the confusion. "We will go with what you have, and we will publish with no change in results. Are you OK with that?" he asked me. I did not realize at that time, neither did Bibek perhaps, his RGICS days would soon be over.