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What South Korea’s KDI gets right that NITI Aayog never did

The comparison between Korea Development Institute and NITI Aayog is not really about two organisations. It is about two theories of how knowledge relates to national development.

South Korea built its premier policy institution, Korea Development Institute, on a founding conviction: You cannot reform a system using only minds formed within it. India built its equivalent, NITI Aayog, on the opposite instinct. Fifty years later, the results speak for themselves.

During the last week of February in Seoul, I sat across from the recently retired president of the Korea Development Institute (KDI) and asked him to explain his country’s transformation. There was one thread that ran through the conversation: To imitate and then innovate, you have to tap into the best practices of the world. It is a necessity. From its founding in 1971, KDI made that conviction institutional. Recruit from abroad. Measure against global standards. Bring outside thinking into the centre of policy. Do not let the institution become a mirror of the system it was built to improve.

It struck me that this single founding conviction—modest in its statement, radical in its implications—is precisely what India’s equivalent institution has never had. And that absence, more than any policy difference, may explain the gap between where the two countries stand today.

The founding contrast 

KDI was South Korea’s first government-supported think tank. When it was established, the country was still poor, still building, still measuring itself against a future it had not yet earned. Its founding mandate was explicit: Provide rigorous, evidence-based policy analysis tied to measurable development outcomes. And crucially, recruit internationally from the beginning, at every level.

Korea’s president at the time took the international recruitment mandate personally. He wrote directly to Korean economists and researchers studying and working in the United States, inviting them to return and build KDI. They were offered compensation above local university professor salaries, a deliberate signal that external intellectual formation was valued, not merely tolerated. Korea’s leadership understood something that is easy to state but hard to act on: That a country cannot generate the thinking needed to escape its institutional constraints using only the thinkers those constraints have produced.

This philosophy was not unique to KDI. The Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP), Korea’s premier trade and international economics research institution, follows the same model. This is a national choice, applied consistently across Korea’s major knowledge institutions for half a century.

NITI Aayog was established in 2015, replacing the Planning Commission, with an ambitious mandate to serve as India’s apex policy think tank, a hub of innovative thinking and a bridge between government and knowledge. Its founding instinct was different. Leadership would come from the Indian Administrative Service. The intellectual ecosystem would be domestic. The institution would be staffed and led by the same administrative class that had run Indian institutions for decades.

This is not a criticism of the individuals who built or led these institutions. It is a question about the choices made at the moment of founding—and what those choices have compounded into over time.

Also read: Indian think tank releases Responsible Nations Index. It measures ethical choices

The leadership profiles of the two........

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