Missed Opportunity

This is a story that needed to be told. Consider the facts. CRISIL, India’s first indigenous ratings agency, was born in 1987, just before the onset of liberalisation. There was no corporate bond market then, lending rates were fixed by regulation, and ratings were unheard of. As the liberalisation story unfolded, so did CRISIL’s. It was the first credit agency to rate debt instruments, first in Asia to issue municipal bond ratings, first in corporate sector ratings, etc. Over the past 25 years, it has admirably matched step with the growth of the Indian economy and markets, battled formidable odds, and built a reputation for being an objective commentator on the market and its players.

How CRISIL was conceptualised and built, who were the people behind it, how it learnt its lessons, and how these lessons were translated into future insights and victories, should have been a gripping tale. Unfortunately, in Doing What Is Right: The CRISIL Story, the authors, Hemanth Gorur and Sumit Chowdhury, do not manage to keep the reader engaged despite having top-notch raw ingredients.

The content is built on inputs from leading financial personalities, such as N. Vaghul, who founded CRISIL, its first Managing Director Pradip Shah, Deepak Parekh, K.V. Kamath, Chanda Kochhar, Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, Ram Charan, U.K. Sinha, among others. There is information on how CRISIL started, how it grew from a purely India-based ratings company to a“global analytical company providing ratings, research, and risk and policy advisory services”, as it now calls itself. The book talks about CRISIL’s overseas acquisitions, its innovations, and a lot more. But its weaknesses subdue the strength of the information.

The chapters are organised on themes such as CRISIL’s nascent years, its approach to branding and advertising, its innovations, its leaders and its acquisitions, and so on. A theoretically sound approach, but since every chapter begins almost from the beginning, the constant back-and-forth in time across chapters restricts the creation of a clear picture of the development of CRISIL over the years.

There is not enough context in the book, thereby weakening it. In 1988, for example, after CRISIL started operations, the authors tell us that Shah’s genius resulted in the idea of having a rating committee with a mix of industry experts and CRISILites. But they don’t say whether such committees were the norm in global agencies then. Also, the tendency to eulogise CRISIL and its leaders gets annoying after a point.

There is also not much detail on Standard & Poor’s (S&P) acquiring majority stake in CRISIL in 2005, and its influence, if any. And though one chapter deals with some challenges faced by CRISIL, one would have hoped to read more about the hurdles.

Ultimately, the difference between a good book and a good attempt lies in its depth of information. This book is more of the latter than the former.