The frontier-man of trade policy

Labanyendu Mansingh, director general of foreign trade, does not think he is a back-room player.

"Whenever exporters have a problem they come to us and people think that commerce ministry means DGFT," he says after the dust on the Exim Policy has settled.

Besides, Mansingh, a 1970-batch IAS officer from the Gujarat cadre, has not exactly been a back-room player in his 33 years as a bureaucrat. In his last stint in Gujarat, Mansingh, in addition to his job as industry secretary, had to oversee the relief and rehabilitation work in Kutch following the earthquake on Republic Day in 2001.

Before that, he was joint secretary in the industry ministry in-charge of the secretariat for industrial assistance, immediately after the government announced the new industrial policy in 1991 and delicensed most industries.

Mansingh comes from a family of bureaucrats. Lalit Mansingh, his elder brother, is India's ambassador to the US and a former foreign secretary. His wife, Anuradha Mansingh, is his batch-mate in the service and topped the 1970 civil service exams. And Mansingh's father-in-law was a former chief secretary of Bihar.

In the last 10 months as DGFT, Mansingh has seen as many as three ministers, each with a distinct work style. While the present Commerce and Industry Minister Arun Jaitley has decided to continue with Murasoli Maran's strategy, Arun Shourie, who was holding additional charge of the ministry intended to move away from Maran's hard-line stance.

What makes Mansingh's assignment more difficult is the fact that there is little left for the government in terms of new policies since most import restrictions have been done away with, and only in March last year, a five-year policy had been announced for 2002-07.

While the commerce minister provides the basic direction to the policy, the directorate does all the spadework, be it interacting with industry bodies or sending inputs to the minister or coordinating with various ministries, including commerce.

In the process, the commerce secretary takes a back seat and his involvement in the policy-making exercise depends on the personal rapport with the DGFT, who is an additional secretary-level officer.

"What makes a DGFT's task more difficult is the fact he has had illustrious predecessors," says an official. If one were to look at the succession list of controller of imports (as DGFT was called in its earlier avatar) and DGFTs you would discover bureaucrats like D R Mehta, Tejinder Khanna and Shyamal Ghosh, to name a few. Mansingh, unlike his immediate high-profile predecessor N L Lakhanpal, has been low-key.

He has an informal style of functioning. For instance, he did not mind calling up film director and producer Shekhar Kapur to make a presentation in Udyog Bhawan after deciding to provide a thrust to the entertainment sector in the latest Exim Policy. Even as he elaborated on the presentation, he could not resist sharing a joke.

In fact, he is ready with an anecdote or joke whenever he is relaxed -- and he is relaxed almost all the time, defying the busy schedule he otherwise keeps.

For instance, while Mansingh elaborated on the Exim Policy's move to attract venture capital in the entertainment sector, he narrated the instance of a large VC that missed out on an opportunity to seed fund Steve Job's computer giant Apple.

Fifty-six year old Mansingh is a graduate from Raven Shaw College, Utkal University, and completed his post-graduation from Delhi University. His earlier stint in the commerce ministry, when he handled exports to the US and engineering goods, during the eighties would definitely come handy now as DGFT.

These days, there is a lot of noise about doing away with the post of DGFT. If that happens, Mansingh would be remembered for making services the main thrust of the policy.