CIERP Alumni Perspectives: A Conversation with Vikram Singh Mehta
By Tarun Gopalakrishnan
This blog post is part of CIERP and CPL’s AAPI Heritage Month Blog Series, where current Fletcher students interview alums of Asian, Asian American, Pacific Islander heritage about their time at Fletcher and their successful careers in the environment sector.
Currently on the Fletcher Board of Trustees and an alumnus of the Fletcher M.A., Vikram Singh Mehta distinctively represents the School’s international and cross-cutting ethos. Hailing from a civil service family, the Indian Administrative Service was a natural early career choice. After two years in the service, he embarked on a different path.
Public policy is in his DNA, Mr. Mehta says, but he was also particularly interested in energy policy (his field at Fletcher was energy economics). Besides, he saw that the nature of public policy had shifted – it was no longer exclusively the domain of the government and the bureaucracy. This mix of interests led him to work across sectors - initially with Phillips Petroleum, then back to the public sector with Oil India Limited, and finally to Shell. After stints in London and Cairo, he moved to India in 1994 and retired as Chairman of the Shell Group of Companies in India in 2012.
While based primarily in the private sector, his roles kept him close to public policy; he considers his key contribution was to align corporate interest with the broader public interest of countries the companies sought to work in. That sometimes involved advising very successful companies that their model, which was optimized for one part of the world, could not be grafted on to different cultures, societies or nationalities.
It also involved interpreting India in the midst of a particularly transitional period of energy sector deregulation. Where India and South Asia were seen in binary terms – “we were regulated, now we are deregulated,” he had to explain that “the pendulum had moved, but it hadn’t swung.” It was more the beginning of a process, ongoing to this day.
Mr. Mehta says that a decision by a Prime Minister, for example, will always be powerful and important, but “there were and are other players in a federal structure – state-level Chief Ministers, the bureaucracy… and civil society, who are not afraid to stand up and challenge. What businesses entering India need to understand is that policies are only effectuated when different arms of the civic polity align.”
The challenge was to bring this home without trying to change what made companies successful in the first place – “to amalgamate their best practices with the nuances and dynamics of the local environment.” Joining Shell when its operations in India were relatively young, he was part of a leadership team that scaled entry hurdles to make it the largest multinational energy company in the country without, he emphasises, “breaching key principles that we stood for.”
On retiring at Shell, Mr. Mehta was intrigued by an offer to take up a similar challenge, but in a different sector – the Brookings Institution was looking to expand its work in India. In early conversations, he was clear about Brookings’ strengths – its empirical solidity and academic integrity. He was equally clear that “to be taken seriously by Indian policymakers as an independent, credible think tank, the research talent and the content of research and its dissemination, had to be Indian.”
That outlook led to the creation of a think tank sustained by Indian grants which, despite rebranding recently as the Centre for Social and Economic Progress, continues as a credible voice in Indian policy circles. Part of its success lies in his ethos for a policy organisation – “to not be afraid to tackle politically relevant issues, but do so in an empirical, rigorous way.” Notwithstanding ideology, he considers there are still more than enough policy questions – “politicians and decision-makers across political divides appreciate good advice on those.”
As Chairman and Distinguished Fellow at CSEP, Mr. Mehta has turned his experience toward the big questions facing decision-makers across sectors, including the developing climate crisis. In an op-ed on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ Green New Deal proposal, he suggested that her success was due to championing an idea whose time had come, at least in the American context.
In India, he notes, climate change is not a similarly salient political issue, but green energy is. He points out that India is doing a lot right on renewable energy - ambitious targets, communicating well on the importance of green energy and, increasingly, a focus on domestic research, development and manufacturing.
While the climate agenda du jour is the announcement of national net zero targets, he offers some nuance – “it is not enough to simply set a time deadline and agree on the steps to be taken. Governments and corporates have also to agree on removing the legacy obstacles that lie on the pathway.”
One of these legacy obstacles is the fragmented institutional framework for Indian energy policy – “there are six or seven different Ministries working on energy, then the Ministry of Environment and one for Water, and the Prime Minister’s Office and advisory institutions like the NITI Aayog. We need a coordinating forum, or an energy-and-environment tsar.”
Another legacy obstacle he identifies is the unstated presumption in planning circles that sharp shifts in natural conditions occur, at most, once in a few decades. Although this presumption is backed by some historical data, and is useful in avoiding charges of gold-plating infrastructure investments, in his view, “for those contemplating the journey of decarbonisation, there is little of the distant past for them to hang onto.”
Mr. Mehta’s belief in India as a key to addressing climate change and other global issues was a big factor in his accepting an invitation to join the Fletcher Board – he wants to “make sure that we appreciate the importance of partnerships with Indian entities, the importance of young people from this region interested in policy issues choosing Fletcher among many choices, and appreciating the unique strengths it brings.”
Having worked and learned all over the world, he is still most at home in India. Even as a committed Indian, he says, “one has to be very modest in one’s understanding of our country, it is so complex.” At the same time, he believes that Indians with experience abroad are valuable contributors to the country - as bringers of new ideas and bridges between cultures.
Tarun Gopalakrishnan is a junior fellow in The Climate Policy Lab at The Fletcher School, Tufts University.