India is the world's largest democracy, and second-largest developing country. For forty years it has also been one of the most dirigiste and autarkic. The 1980s saw most developing and erstwhile communist countries opt for market economic systems. India belatedly initiated similar reforms in 1991. This book evaluates the progress of those reforms, covering all of the major areas of policy; stabilization, taxation and trade, domestic and external finance, agriculture, industry, the social sectors, and poverty alleviation. Will India realize its great potential by freeing itself from the self-imposed constraints that have hindered its development? This is the important and fascinating question considered by this book.
Since 1991, the Indian economy has been exposed to economic liberalization and globalization in line with structural adjustment and stabilisation policies initiated by IMF and World Bank. This analysis outlines the controversial shift in Indian economic policy from State-oriented development strategy to market-oriented development that leaves decisions of production and distribution to be made by the market.
In this commemorative volume, India's top business leaders and economic luminaries come together to provide a balanced picture of the consequences of the country’s economic reforms, which were initiated in 1991. What were the reforms? What were they intended for? How have they affected the overall functioning of the economy? With contributions from Mukesh Ambani, Narayana Murthy, Sunil Mittal, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Shivshankar Menon, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, T.N. Ninan, Sanjaya Baru, Naushad Forbes, Omkar Goswami and R. Gopalakrishnan, India Transformed delves deep into the life of an economically liberalized India through the eyes of the people who helped transform it.
A collection of well-thought-out lectures delivered by 14 eminant scholars to knowlegeable assemblies, administrative services, and the Reserve Bank of India.
India today is a vibrant free-market democracy, a nation well on its way to overcoming decades of widespread poverty. The nation’s rise is one of the great international stories of the late twentieth century, and in India Unbound the acclaimed columnist Gurcharan Das offers a sweeping economic history of India from independence to the new millennium. Das shows how India’s policies after 1947 condemned the nation to a hobbled economy until 1991, when the government instituted sweeping reforms that paved the way for extraordinary growth. Das traces these developments and tells the stories of the major players from Nehru through today. As the former CEO of Proctor & Gamble India, Das offers a unique insider’s perspective and he deftly interweaves memoir with history, creating a book that is at once vigorously analytical and vividly written. Impassioned, erudite, and eminently readable, India Unbound is a must for anyone interested in the global economy and its future.
This study systematically evaluates the economic consequences of globalization for India in the light of the attack of the critics against globalization on grounds of economic stagnation, ?deindustrialization,? ?denationalization,? destabilization, and impoverishment. On the basis of abundant qualitative and quantitative data, it strongly repudiates the case of the critics, and demonstrates that India has been a significant beneficiary of the globalization process. Instead of economic stagnation, India has seen acceleration in its average annual rate of economic growth. Instead of deindustrialization, there has been substantial industrial growth and, indeed, acceleration in the industrial growth rate.Instead of denationalization, business in India is now more competitive and is venturingforth into the global market; increased imports and the entry of foreign multinationalshave not swamped it; essentially, India is master of its own destiny. Instead of economicdestabilization, there has been since the paradigm shift in economic policy in 1991 a marked absence of economic crisis in India. And, instead of impoverishment, India hasseen a long and unprecedented period of welfare enhancement since it began its reintegration into the world economy in 1975; there has been a secular decline in povertysince then, while inequality has not increased much. The policy conclusion that flows from this experience is that India ought to be, in general, more open to globalization in the interest of sustaining the acceleration in economic growth and enhancing the welfare of its people. To this end it should push forward with the reform agenda.This is the twenty-second publication in Policy Studies, a peer-reviewed East-West Center Washington series that presents scholarly analysis of key contemporary domestic and international political, economic, and strategic issues affecting Asia in a policy relevant manner.
