Sumantra Chakrabarti is what you would call a khoob bhalo chhele (very good boy). Having arrived in Calcutta yesterday, the president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) will catch a few moments of calm in the Ballygunge flat he has thoughtfully bought for his elderly parents, Hirendranath and Gayatri.

Chakrabarti’s family home is in Oxford and during the working week he has an apartment in Paddington, London. But as a much loved and dutiful only son, he periodically pops over to Calcutta to see his parents.

However, this time he will soon be off to Mumbai and Delhi for what will be his first official visit to India.

When we meet at his office in London, he grins and says: “A Bengali boy won — that’s a very good thing!”

In England Chakrabarti is better known as Sir Suma Chakrabarti, having been knighted in 2006. In July 2012, the Bengali boy was “elected” president of the EBRD for a four-year term, beating four other candidates — a German, a Frenchman, a Pole and a Serb — after the British government mounted a highly effective campaign for their man.

It’s not a bad little job, judging by his contract, which the EBRD publishes on its website. “Your gross annual salary will be £3,29,380, payable in equal monthly instalments (approximately Rs 22,47,060 a month),” reads his appointment letter. “...you will be entitled to reimbursement for any reasonable expense incurred by you on the business of the Bank... You will be entitled to housing benefits... the Bank will provide a chauffeured car for your use... your travel expenses shall include travel and hotel expenses of your spouse...”

Since 2007, Chakrabarti had served as permanent secretary at the ministry of justice in Britain. Prior to that, he was permanent secretary at the department for international development. For those who have enjoyed Yes Minister on television — and Chakrabarti himself is a huge fan of Britain’s wittiest comedy series — he is the Sir Humphrey Appleby character.

For the moment, Chakrabarti’s mind is on the task that lies ahead. “It’s my turn to cook and I am making dal tonight and mince curry (a hazardous undertaking since nearly all British supermarket lamb and beef mince is contaminated with horsemeat carrying cancer producing chemicals).”

Chakrabarti’s daughter thinks her dad’s dal is almost as tasty as that made by his mother. With a wrench Chakrabarti and I turn away from discussing the right way of doing the shombar (tempering) to the talks he will be holding in India.

In Delhi, he will have talks with finance minister P. Chidambaram, and people at the commerce ministry, preceded by high level discussions in Mumbai with Tata, Reliance, Mahindra & Mahindra, JSW, Exim Bank and other companies.

Chakrabarti explains to me that his bank cannot actually invest in India since the country is not one of the EBRD’s 66 shareholders. However, the bank — set up in 1991 after the fall of the Berlin Wall to encourage the transition to democratic principles and free market economies in central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc countries — can team up with Indian companies to undertake joint ventures in its “countries of operation”. These have now been expanded to include Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan.

Over the past 20 years, the value of such joint ventures between the EBRD and Indian companies has totalled 806.8 million euros, with 641.5m euros provided by the bank and Indian investment accounting for 165.3m euros. Under bank policy, the majority of projects is in the private sector — in finance, industry, commerce and agribusiness in Russia, Turkey, Romania and elsewhere.

We come to the reason he is in India. The figure of 800m euros may seem a lot. But, says Chakrabarti, “It is actually not a very large number. India is an important source of foreign direct investment in the EBRD’s countries of operations. Given the size of the Indian private sector today and its existing interests in the same countries that we are interested in, that co-operation should be much stronger.”

In theory, a Calcutta firm, big or small, could undertake a joint venture with the EBRD in eastern or central Europe, one of the former Soviet republics such as Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, or North Africa or the Middle East. “We particularly think that Indian companies already know Russia well.”

“Integrity matters enormously to us,” Chakrabarti emphasises. “Our reputation is built on it. When we consider who we might invest with, we do extraordinarily detailed checks before we get involved with them. That’s why we don’t have scandals.”

The impressive team Chakrabarti has taken to India includes Christoph Denk, director of the president’s office; Nandita Parshad, a vivacious Calcutta Loreto girl who is his director for power and energy; and Anthony Williams, the urbane head of media relations and a former Reuters man in India.

So, how did Chakrabarti get from Point A (he was born in 1959 in Jalpaiguri) to Point B (the spacious president’s office at the EBRD’s headquarters adjacent to Liverpool Street in London)?

He begins at the beginning. “I grew up in Calcutta for the first five years of my life and came to this country in 1964 because my father was a Commonwealth scholar, He came to do his PhD.” Hirendranath was based at St Antony’s College, Oxford, where his PhD, ironically, was on “terrorism in Bengal”. In 1968, he returned to Calcutta, and Chakrabarti and his mother followed in 1969.

Then 10 years old, Chakrabarti was admitted to St Xavier’s School, but was unable to attend classes even for a single day “because there was a Naxalite rebellion going on,” he dimly remembers.

“So I was sent back to school in England with my mother and then I thought I would go back to India after university. I went to New College, Oxford, and did PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) there. Then I met my Japanese wife and I didn’t go back. So this is a story of accidental migration,” he says.

After his MA from Sussex University, Chakrabarti became a development economist. He worked in Africa, particularly in Botswana, and then came back and joined the British civil service. “I was in the Overseas Development Administration in the ’80s. I then worked in the Treasury and I ran public spending in the first of Gordon Brown’s public spending reviews. Then I worked for (Tony) Blair and created the strategy unit,” says Chakrabarti.

His wife, Mari Sako, who is a fellow of New College, is professor of management studies at the Saïd Business School in Oxford. Their daughter, Maya, 17, is very keen on art.

“I can’t get her to do any homework other than drawing more pictures,” her father says indulgently. On his office wall hangs one of Maya’s creations dating from her early period — “she was four,” he says.

Chakrabarti enjoys reading — “Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy is my favourite novel of all time” — and has a fondness for the arts. “Bengalis love the arts — it’s in my family’s blood, really,” he laughs. “My father was curator of the Victoria Memorial for a while as well as being a professor of history at Presidency College, Calcutta. We have a house in Santiniketan. That is being part of the arts intelligentsia set, I guess,” he laughs.

Chakrabarti is all praise for the way Britain nurtures ethnic and cultural diversity. And nowhere is that more evident than in the civil service, he says. “Increasingly, the civil service is much more diverse than any other civil service in the world,” he enthuses. “It is much more open to people from a different national origin.”

The difficulty in Britain has been more in the private sector, he says. “You don’t see many people of Indian origin at the top — you see more of that in the United States. You see more Indians at the top of the public services here — in the National Health Service and so on.”

Chakrabarti feels that Britain is a model country in terms of its diversity. “I would like to see more, of course. But I never met my opposite number in any European country who was permanent secretary and born anywhere else but in that country.”

Following David Cameron’s recent mission to India perhaps it will become emotionally and intellectually easier for Indians to consider calling themselves, say, “British and Bengali”.

It’s something Chakrabarti already feels about himself. “I feel very much a dual cultural affiliation and can operate very easily in either culture — and I spend a lot of time in India in West Bengal.”

Evidently, the twain — East and West — does meet in the person of Sumantra Chakrabarti.