P Lal

Not many would know that the TS Central State Library, Sector 17, Chandigarh, is named after a distinguished civil servant of Punjab — Tarlok Singh, ICS officer, who — as the Director-General Rehabilitation (September 1947-December 1949) — played a stellar role in re-settling about half a million families from Pakistan.

Later, he was chosen by Jawaharlal Nehru, the then Prime Minister of India, to be his first private secretary. He guided the affairs in the Planning Commission for 17 years, rising to become its member. He was a great economist, too, and of international fame. He was the only civil servant to have been decorated with all three Padma awards.

He was born on February 26, 1913, in Gujranwala, now in Pakistan. An alumnus of the London School of Economics (1933-1936), he was the favourite student of Professor Harold Laski, a noted economist, who had groomed luminaries such as Jawaharlal Nehru, KR Narayanan, VK Krishna Menon, and Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s former prime minister who served for more than 15 years.

Tarlok Singh joined the ICS in 1937 after clearing Indian Civil Services examination held in London. There were five streams of entry to the ICS then — separate competitive examinations in London, and in India; nominations; promotion from the Provincial Civil Service; and appointments from the bar. Tarlok Singh was, however, not very bright in his educational career in the beginning. His son, Jaideep Singh, himself an MBA from Harvard University and a former Professor in the Indian Institute of Public Administration, New Delhi, mentions in an essay, ‘Tarlok Singh-Some Reflections’, that in the younger days, his father had taken to cinema and theatre to the neglect of education with the result that he plucked in the matriculation examination.

Tarlok Singh, later, became an economist of repute and played a vital role in the economic regeneration of the nascent Indian state and also in the developmental processes of other newly independent nations after the collapse of colonialism post World War II. For his pioneering work in the field of economics, he was awarded the Soderstorm Medal for Economics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, in 1970.

He was awarded the Padma Shri (1954), Padma Bhushan (1962), and Padma Vibhushan (2000). His work as an officer in charge of resettlement finds laudatory mention in noted historian Ramachandra Guha’s ‘India After Gandhi-The History of the World’s Largest Democracy’. He notes that Tarlok Singh had the onerous task of allotting land to the refugees who had abandoned 2.7 million hectare in West Punjab, whereas only 1.9 million hectare left by Muslims were available in East Punjab. Tarlok Singh introduced the concepts of the ‘standard acre’ and the ‘graded cut’. The former meant a parcel of land yielding 10-11 maunds of rice, a maund being about 40 kilograms. In certain un-irrigated areas, four physical acres might mean one standard acre while in lush green canal colonies, they might equal the standard acre. The idea of the ‘ graded cut’ helped overcome the massive discrepancy between the land left behind by the refugees and the land now available — a gap of about a million acres. For example, for the first ten acres of a claim, a cut of 25% was imposed; for higher claims, cuts were steeper.

Pran Seth, a journalist and an erstwhile employee of the Punjab government, writes in his book, ‘Lahore to Delh-Rising from the ashes-Autobiography of an unknown Refugee from Pakistan’ that working under Tarlok Singh was a great education. He was a dignified man having an open mind and an open-door policy towards all refugees who came to see him. There were no security checks, no policemen at the door, no searching and no waiting for the already tormented refugees.

Tarlok Singh served in the Planning Commission as deputy secretary, joint secretary, and additional secretary, eventually rising to become its member (1962-1967).

He played a pivotal role in the preparation of the first three Five Year Plans. In fact, he was so pervasive in the Commission that the Commission came to be known as Tarlok Sabha. Montek Singh Ahluwalia, at one time a Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, while delivering the first Tarlok Singh Memorial Lecture on ‘ Role of Planning, A New Perspective’ associated the great names of Jawaharlal Nehru, PC Mahalanobis and Tarlok Singh with the planned development model of the Indian economy.

Tarlok Singh was intensely interested in the development of social sciences. After returning in 1974 from the UNICEF, where he worked as the Deputy Executive Director (Planning), he endeavoured to set up the Committee on Studies for Cooperation in Development in South Asia (CSCD) comprising research institutions and scholars in five counties of South Asia – Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh , Nepal and India. The CSCD provided the framework for the formation of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) which came into existence in 1985.

Another institution that Tarlok Singh created was the Indian Association of Social Science Institutions (IASSI). The IASSI has been organising Tarlok Singh Memorial Lectures since 2006. Among the books authored or edited by Tarlok Singh, eight in total, the most important one was: Poverty and Social Change: A study in the Reorganisation of Indian Rural Society which came out in 1945.

The contribution of Tarlok Singh in building India and tackling seemingly intractable problems in the years after independence has been immense. The modern generation would, most probably, not be aware of this great man of unimpeachable integrity, simplicity, modesty and capacity of relentless work.

Tarlok Singh breathed his last on December 10, 2005, at the ripe old age of 92. His legacy, however, lives on.