Self-sufficiency held India back: Prof. Arvind Panagariya on some useful economic history lessons on how we manage to handicap ourselves. “It has gone virtually unrecognised that the goal of economic self-sufficiency single handedly held the Indian economy back for nearly four decades. All else, including the licence permit raj, small scale industries (SSI) reservation and heavy presence of the public sector was either a by-product of this goal or sideshow.”
What must be done to make the most of a sweet spot India is in: by Anantha Nageswaran. “On its part, the government can do more to consolidate India’s sweet spot. It should divest itself of LIC. I don’t mean Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC). That will happen. I mean the Licence, Inspection and Compliance Raj. This should be the mission and mantra of the Union, state and local governments for this decade. India will not only have fully opened up then, but also have arrived as a competitive economic force.”
There’s no such thing as self-reliance: by Mihir Sharma. “For sustained growth India needs to use foreign capital and foreign know-how to produce goods that it sells in foreign markets. What’s self-reliant in that?”
