Dr. Vijay Kelkar, Chairman of India’s 13th Finance Commission, is an eminent economist and public policy intellectual widely recognized within India as an unrelenting champion of privatization, liberalization, and market-based economic and financial policies. Over his long and distinguished career in public service, Dr. Kelkar has made numerous contributions to public policy with his revolutionary reports on direct and indirect taxesbeing the most popular. Even so, he has often gone beyond his official roles to contribute ideas on important issues through his lectures. Some that come to mind are “growth turnpike” in the Narayanan seminar, financial inclusivity in the Sen seminar, accounting reforms, IMF governance, infrastructure, and, now, a seminal paper on natural gas policy in India.
Briefly, Dr. Kelkar is recommending a free-ermarket for natural gas in India and articulates specific policies toward the same. He contextualizes these recommendations with an analysis of India’s growing energy needs and its natural gas resource potential, the current policy’s shortcomings, and comparisons with international policies. This is relevant and timely because of four reasons:
- Recent geological assessments and discoveries are indicating that India will likely be a major natural gas player
- India is currently in the midst of the eighth round of bidding for oil and gas exploration and production blocks
- Existing natural gas allocation and pricing policies are the cause of a major on-going corporate dispute
- Appropriate gas pricing in an emerging economy such as India will bode well for global demand and supply
