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Manmohan means greater market access for us

Says Prof Rehman Sobhan

REAZ AHMAD
With Manmohan Singh at the helm of the new Indian government, Bangladesh can expect a greater market access to its immediate neighbour.
Singh's old friend and Bangladesh's noted economist Prof Rehman Sobhan firmly believes that Manmohan, as the new prime minister, will further open up Indian market to goods from Bangladesh.
Prof Sobhan and Singh were ®he ^aSy ^tar
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contemporaries in academic life, both completing their graduation from the Cambridge. Talking to The Daily Star at his office yesterday, Rehman Sobhan said he had visited Singh's Delhi home last time in 1995, when Singh was serving the Congress government of India as its finance minister. "I went to the Indian capital to take part in the first Indo-Bangla economic dialogue. He was very supportive of opening up Indian market to Bangladeshi goods," the veteran economist reminisced.
"I believe he (Singh) will understand it well that Bangladesh's greater market access to India will benefit us all," Sobhan, who also heads the country's leading think-tank Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), said.
Recalling that the economic reform process got underway in India during the Rajiv-days, Prof Sobhan said, compared to its South Asian neighbours, India ultimately got late in opening up its market; but Manmohan in his stint as the finance minister since 1991 had accelerated the process.
Asked whether he finds any conflict of interests in economic policies between the Congress and the leftist parties that supported it in forming the government in Delhi, the professor said, "I don't think so. Manmohan is a very pragmatic person. He is not that theoretical, either. He applies common sense more, and is very flexible towards different economic approaches."
According to Indian press reports, Singh, a 71-year Sikh who became India's first non-Hindu prime minister yesterday, has immediately pledged to turn the world's largest democracy into an economic model that "makes new opportunities available to the poor."
Reminiscing the Cambridge days of the '50s, Rehman Sobhan said, "He (Singh) came to Cambridge in 1955 at Saint Johns College. That was the year in which (Nobel laureate) Amartya (Sen) passed out of the university. I graduated from Cambridge in 1956 and Manmohan completed his graduation in economics next year securing a first class. He also received the prestigious Adam Smith Award."
Prof Sobhan credited Sonia Gandhi for choosing the "most honest and modest gentleman" for
Violent courtship
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the top job of India, whom he described as a "man of great integrity." "Manmohan was a quiet, shy man who would remain engrossed in studies and had little involvement in extra-curricular activities during our Cambridge days," he recalled.
After passing out of Saint Johns College, the professor went on, Singh did his post-doctoral studies at Nuffield College, Oxford in the early '60s. Bangladesh's renowned lawyer Dr Kamal Hossain was also studying at Oxford at that time, he added.
Prof Sobhan said, after a brief stint as academic when he taught economics at Punjab University, Manmohan worked as economic adviser to the Indian finance ministry, then its finance secretary, governor of the Reserve Bank of India and member secretary of planning commission. Afterwards he joined the South Commission in Geneva as its secretary general.
"Upon his invitation, I also went to Geneva and worked for two months (April-May, 1989) and contributed a little to the South Commission's report," Sobhan said fondly recalling his close contacts with Manmohan.