Bimal Jalan likes reading the accounts of the movers and shakers who have lunch with Business Standard, but he doesn't like what he reads. There's too much about what they ate, which soup, what main course…. I want to discuss serious issues.

So we agree to meet; his choice is the House of Ming at the Taj Mahal hotel in Delhi, and the staff know him well: the choice of fresh lime soda, the lemon and coriander soup…. We manage to try something different, but let me finish the subject of food by saying that he allowed me to choose the soup, then ordered one vegetarian noodle dish, and closed with a date pancake.

He neither drank nor ate any of it, pecking at the stuff in front of him while he talked. You're obviously no foodie, I said. No, he confessed, if you order the same stuff every time it saves you the bother of having to decide from what is on the menu. In any case, his mind feeds on other issues.

Having shed the Reserve Bank, he is getting ready to start a new innings as the Rajya Sabha convenes for its winter session. No, he does not intend to make his maiden speech this session; and no, he does not intend to ask any questions either. It'll be a low-key start, he says.

I ask if he will be sitting between Hema Malini and Dara Singh. He doesn't know and is not interested, other than the fact that there is a designated row for nominated members (so it could well be the actress and the wrestler).

He is in Parliament because he believes in the parliamentary system, it is central to the governance of India, and the quality of governance needs improvement. If he can play a role, then he should. Though he adds that for any individual to make a difference, is to expect a lot. Still, he wants to try.

But there will be 10 per cent attendance after question hour, half of that 10 per cent will be sleeping, no newspaper will bother to report what you say, and you will be wasting your breath, I suggest. He is unmoved and wants to give it a shot.

"Things have never been better for the economy, but things have never been worse when it comes to governance." He is concerned about the quality of politics and politicians, about the quality of debate. He sees the delivery of government services as a problem area, even though this is not subject to party politics in the way that the reform debate is.

He sees how good intentions on new laws get distorted in the consultation process before the law is even enacted. He sees how we keep adding new layers (like new regulatory bodies) without discarding any old ones, so that the system just gets more complicated.

And he thinks that if the system can be tweaked on some of these issues, we can improve our growth rate by 2 per cent annually, for the next five years, even without tackling problematic issues like labour policy. And he wants to see if as a parliamentarian he can contribute to making this faster growth and better governance happen.

Many things become clear as he rolls this out. First, he does not expect to be holding any office; despite all the speculation, he will remain an ordinary MP. Second, he is in the high-minded tradition of India's economic policy mandarins, public-spirited to the bone. And third, he sees all the warts in the system and can't take his eyes away from them.

I suggest that retired people tend to focus on the warts, while younger people get on with things, and he thinks about it before half conceding the point. Indeed, he confesses that the reactions to the announcement of his Rajya Sabha nomination have been mixed. Many have congratulated him, but many have also asked him why he is wasting his time. The cynicism bothers him.

I suggest to him that he sees the many failures of government, but holds back from the conclusion that the government is not the answer. He pauses barely a second before shooting back: "Of course, everyone will agree that the government is not the answer, but the government has to provide the answer."

And he recounts the case in which the file on a decision taken by the government moved 237 times before the decision could be implemented. "This is not politically sensitive, no one is going to oppose change, but it doesn't happen. Why?" He has a thought: all ministries should report every two or three months on how many public representations they have got, and the details of the file movement before the citizen concerned got a satisfactory response or had his problem resolved.

"You cannot imagine how much of my time at the RBI went in answering calls from people who simply wanted what they are entitled to under the rules."

Still, the Rajya Sabha won't get all his attention. He is working on a book, his fourth (no prizes for guessing what it will focus on). And he is busy, busy, busy with all manner of other things, including a project that he won't talk about just yet. So we have to wait for the surprises. Finally, he concedes: "If I find that I am not making a difference in Parliament, then I will give more time to the other things."

Looking back on the last 30 years (he joined the finance ministry as economic adviser in 1973), he thinks that India has been lucky in having a succession of able and public-spirited finance ministers, barring one or two whom he will not name (discretion is Bimal Jalan's middle name).

Asked why our record is then so poor, and whether prime ministers have repeatedly failed to do the right thing on economic policy, he responds that they have always focused on the issue and given responsible responses when the chips are down. I suggest that this is only in times of crisis, but he argues that they also move well in order to prevent a crisis.

What they seem to not do (and this is my conclusion, not his) is stay focused in non-crisis periods on the things that need doing in order to realise the country's potential.

He looks back with satisfaction on his record in the Reserve Bank. "We paid out five billion dollars in a day (against the Resurgent India Bonds), and no one even noticed. Today we can go and get ourselves the best equipment our defence forces we need, because we don't have to worry about the foreign exchange.

You can holiday abroad without a spending limit, send your daughter to a foreign university without paperwork where the RBI will not allow you to remit money to your daughter but only to the university she attends, and get medical treatment abroad without getting doctors' endorsements from here and overseas, and then filling all kinds of forms."

Many of these decisions, he discloses, were actually taken long ago but the babus found ways to tie people down with paperwork, until he stepped in. And there was, of course, the saga over not stapling currency bundles, and getting rid of soiled notes without using thousands of people to re-count the notes that had already been counted by the banks. Jalan won that battle by simply asking the employees to sit at home on full pay and then some.

The ex-governor himself is a long way from sitting quietly at home and enjoying his grandchildren. In his early sixties, he reminds you of Frost's poem (miles to go…), but isn't burdened by the thought, wearing it lightly on his slight frame as we walk out and he calls for his driver and Maruti Esteem.