It’s that time of the year when pravasis, or nonresident Indians, get pride of place in this country. At the annual Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, an event that has come to stay regardless of what critics have said, they are given a voice they didn’t always have, or most certainly a voice they didn’t believe they had.

Looks like they did a long time ago, precisely since the 1990s when Manmohan Singh embarked on the economic reforms. According to Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, who spoke at the Pravasi event in New Delhi yesterday, Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao was profoundly influenced by his many kin abroad and consequently allowed Singh to push through with the path-breaking economic reforms.

“Coming from his own family’s immediate experience aboard, the message carried great salience and cemented the resolve of the prime minister to pull India out of the rut into which it had fallen,” Singh reportedly told Bhagwati, according to an extract of Bhagwati’s address published in today’s Business Standard.

As an economist, rather than a career politician, Singh has needed no persuasion to listen to Indian voices abroad, or indeed to woo them back. That is a reason why he has brought  them on at the highest advisory levels, making sure they make the most impact. In recent years, we have seen the return of telecom guru Sam Pitroda, former IMF chief economist Raghuram Rajan and just months ago Kaushik Basu, the Cornell University economist who has in fact taken up a full-time job as chief economic adviser at the Finance Ministry.

It’s time Singh got the big guy himself. Of course, I refer to Bhagwati. Among the best economists of his time, Bhagwati has often been fancied for a Nobel Prize. Even when Amartya Sen won it in 1998, Bhagwati’s name was the one speculated.

With degrees in Cambridge University and MIT, he returned to work as a professor of economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, where, among other things, he considered policy choices to help India eradicate poverty. Bhagwati later became professor of international trade at the Delhi School of Economics but left India to join MIT in 1968, after his voice was never heeded and he probably felt unwanted.

I remember Bhagwati saying, probably sometime in the 1990s, all he needed to return to India was a call from the prime minister. The time for that call has surely come.  For too many years, we have talked about double-digit GDP growth, and outpacing China’s rate of growth. We have accomplished neither goal. Kaushik Basu has in recent weeks expressed the view that India will begin to grow faster than China but increasingly it is clear, we need a fresh policy stimulus. There can be no better man for the job than Bhagwati.