Amitabh Kant readies for a post-retirement gig with think tank Niti Aayog

It was the summer of 2001. The then Kerala tourism secretary, Amitabh Kant, got a call from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). Ashok Saikia was on the line. Saikia, one of the most powerful PMO officials during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime (1998-2004), had made up his mind that Kant must join the Union tourism ministry, even though there was no vacancy there.

A few months before that call, Vajpayee had spent a week holidaying in Kerala, a Communist state known for being distinctly industry-unfriendly that was creating a counter-intuitive buzz courtesy of a tourism campaign called God’s Own Country. Kant seized the moment and took Vajpayee on a houseboat, showing him around the backwaters and narrating the story of a brand that was created out of the state’s roots — traditional nalukettu houses, houseboats, martial arts, indigenous ayurveda and the like. Saikia had accompanied the PM on that vacation. A year later, Saikia used his influence to create a vacancy in the ministry of tourism, allowing Kant to move on to a pan-India stage and in the years ahead script the story of Incredible India. “I always believe that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Governments were used to working with mediocrity. But I made it a point to work with the best in the field,” Kant told ET Magazine in an hourlong interview, days before retiring as an Indian Administrative Service officer and moving on to NITI Aayog as its full-time chief executive on a two-year contract. (He had taken additional charge as CEO of NITI Aayog two months ago). Kant then explains how he had changed the tendering process with the approval of the then finance minister to bring in an internationally acclaimed advertising agency to handle the Incredible India campaign. (See “Creating Brands in Govt is 100 Times More Difficult”) Fast forward to May 2014. When Narendra Modi was sworn in as the prime minister, Kant was already serving as a secretary in the Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (DIPP), a low-profile government department with the key mandate of facilitating investment and technology flows. Modi, who personally knew Kant and followed him on Twitter since the days when he was the chief minister of Gujarat, retained the bureaucrat in the same department but with a larger mandate of driving some of his dream projects — Make in India, Ease of Doing Business and Startup India. As Kant leaves Udyog Bhawan on Monday, the DIPP’s profile has definitely grown larger than the supposedly high-profile ministries like power and petroleum.

Talking Numbers As Kant recalls, coordinating with 25 departments in the runup to a high-voltage, manufacturing campaign, and that too within the first four months of the Modi government, was a humongous task. A creative agency Wieden+Kennedy was hired; the logo of a lion on the move was finalised (the tiger was a contender till the last moment); and finally there was a gala function in the presence of the captains of the industry to roll out Make in India. Critics say, and rightly, that the campaign has delivered results only in foreign investments (a 39% increase in foreign direct investment since launch), but failed to stimulate the industrial investment climate. As the latest data shows, the proposed investment in the industrial sector has declined by 23% to Rs 3.11 lakh crore in 2015 compared with Rs 4.05 lakh crore the previous year.

But the same critics won’t possibly contest the creative appeal and overall execution of the Make in India campaign. Small wonder, Kant’s love for creativity and his ability to handle large events and campaigns led the PMO to hand over Startup India to the DIPP. The launch itself created a buzz when over 2 lakh entrepreneurs asked for entry passes against a seating capacity of 1,350 in New Delhi’s Vigyan Bhavan where the PM launched it in January. “Amitabh Kant has the ability to understand scale and ambition of an idea very quickly. I believe if you don’t invest personally and take risk, you can’t build anything of quality even if you have the might of the government behind you,” says V Sunil, former executive creative director of Wieden+Kennedy and the one who has been associated with Kant’s branding ventures since the days of Incredible India.

Kant is doubtless a sarkari brand-builder par excellence. Now it is up to the owners to ensure the brands deliver on their promise.