India's Economic Reforms and Development

This collection of essays, put together by Isher Judge Ahluwalia and I. M. D. Little, to honour Dr Manmohan Singh on his sixty fifth birthday, contains contributions by fifteen eminent economists, all of whom have known Dr Singh for several years. They analyse the course of economic development in India and the status of the economic reforms initiated in 1991and present what needs to be done if the benefits are to be fully realized.

In the first section, Jagdish Bhagwati, Meghnad Desai and Amartya Sen discuss the strategy of Indian development and its failures in the past. C. Rangarajan analyses the trade-off between monetary and growth objectives. In the next section, we have Montek Ahluwalia, Ashok Gulati, Vijay Joshi, Ajit Singh and T.N. Srinivasan probing areas in which reforms have lagged, such as infrastructure, agriculture, financial sector reforms and foreign trade and investment.

This is followed by discussions on poverty alleviation: Deepak Lal, Kirit Parikh and Suresh Tendulkar emphasize that growth promoting reforms are essential for poverty alleviation, while other measures are needed to ensure that all benefit. The final section includes essays by Raja Chelliah and Amaresh Bagchi which underline the key role of state governments in the future course of India's reforms. Inter-state cooperation is seen as an important means of achieving our fiscal goal. The political economy of centre state relations is analysed by Pai Panandikar.

This book is invaluable for students, teachers and researchers of economics, and for journalists, NGOs, those in banking and finance, indeed anyone interested in India's economic reforms.