Remarkable Civil Servant and Redeemer of Refugees

Tarlok Singh (1913 – 2005)

If a compulsive film and theatre buff flunked his matriculation exam, his academic doom, in all probability, should be a foregone conclusion, and his consequent strides would predictably take him to Bombay, the tinsel town of cinemascope prospects.

Well, it wasn’t so in the case of Padma Vibhushan,?Padma Bhushan,?and Padma Shri Tarlok Singh! Notwithstanding the momentary histrionic distractions of his formative years, he went on to become one of India’s most prolific civil servants, a proud alumnus of the London School of Economics, and the author of India’s first five year plan. ??

Recipient of the prestigious Soderstrom Medal for Economics?awarded by the?Royal Swedish Academy of Science,?Stockholm, Tarlok Singh wore many hats with equal aplomb.

He was first private secretary to India’s first prime minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru; he served as UNICEF?Deputy Executive Director (Planning); he was Visiting Senior Research Economist at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (now known as Princeton School); he was the first Chairman of the Indian Association of Social Science Institutions; and he was a prolific author of such insightful books including Poverty and Social Change,?Land Resettlement Manual for Displaced Persons,?The Planning Process,?Towards an Integrated Society, and?India's Development Experience.

Having said that, his incredible achievements during his stint as the Director General of Rehabilitation, Punjab?have immortalised him in history. The province of Punjab was in a state of flux in the aftermath of the partition, now ruthlessly divided between ‘East’ and ‘West’ to denote Indian and Pakistan territories respectively. ?

The India-bound refugees had abandoned as many as 2.7 million hectares of land but the land available on the Indian side was only 1.9 million hectares. The problem of reduced acreage was made even more complex given the multitude of claims from refugees, differing fertility of lands (a mixed bag of arid regions and irrigated pockets), and growing demands for the recreation of village communities as a whole. ??

Faced with the formidable challenge of land allocation to about half a million post-partition refugees, Singh devised the innovative concepts of standard acre and graded cut.

Standard acre implied a land parcel yielding 10 to 11 maunds of rice (one maund equals 40 kg). For dry regions, 4 actual acres were deemed to be 1 standard acre; while for the irrigated lands, 1 actual acre was deemed to be 1 standard acre. This mechanism addressed the challenge of soil and climatic variations. ?????

As regards graded cut, a straight cut of 25% was imposed on first ten acres of any claim, and as claims got higher (or taller) so did the graded cuts: 30% for 10 to 30 acres and more for higher bands (more than 500 acres were subjected to a 95% graded cut.)

Through this innovation, as many as 250000 allotments were made equitably across Eastern Punjab, and 7000 officials worked day and night for three years to make the resettlements happen. ????

The herculean effort of civil servant Tarlok Singh and his ingenious use of heuristics were an undeniably venerable solution in the aftermath of a horrendous event, notwithstanding the fact that it left a few loopholes and many skewed decisions, as also several refugees dissatisfied and even fuming, a collateral damage that India had no option but to live with as a lesser evil.

That Independent India is largely unaware of this visionary economist and civil servant is a tragedy as grave as the Partition.