Author: Sameer Kochhar
Pages: 279
ISSN: 978-81-929172-9-0
Language: English
Edition: First
Pub. Year: 2016
“No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.” India began the quest for a free and open economy in 1991 while remembering the powerful quote of Victor Hugo, a series of brave measures of liberalisation and promise of reforms with human face. It was the historic moment India ended forty-four years of closed, government-planned economic experimentation with a humbling recognition that none of the old socialist shibboleths mattered to truly modernise the economy to shed the inferiority complex.
India has changed in ways unimaginable in the last 25-years and the momentum favoured economic liberalisation. For those who have lived long enough under the oppressive licence-permit-quota-raj era, it would be grotesque to even compare the pre- post-economic liberalisation India. Neither would have modernity washed the shores of India the way it has nor would the country have found self-confidence and social justice the way it has, if not for the post-1991 economic reforms.
The sequencing of the economic reform process after 1991, is described in this book vividly; and, with a personal touch. In its brisk history telling, one shall encounter ringside view of important personalities who orchestrated the reforms that brought millions and millions of people of India to a better and rewarding life and some key lessons missing in the history telling elsewhere, without which the recount of the reforms would never be complete.
Sameer Kochhar, Chairman of SKOCH Group, is a reform historian and author of the best-seller ModiNomics. He is an expert on governance and inclusive growth, endorsed by Narendra Modi, M. Venkaiah Naidu, Manmohan Singh, Arun Jaitley, P. Chidambaram, Yashwant Sinha, C. Rangarajan and Montek Singh Ahluwalia. He has published over 18 volumes, including India 2030: A Socio-Economic Paradigm, ModiNomics, Defeating Poverty, and Modi’s Odyssey: Digital India, Developed India. He has recently published India 2047: High Income with Equity.