Under Modi Govt, The Poor Are Back To Square One 30 Years After Liberalisation
The QuintRivers of ink have been spilt over the past few weeks in recollections and nostalgic anecdotes marking three decades of India’s economic liberalisation. Mint carried a column debate between Jayati Ghosh and Montek S. Ahluwalia. I neither attempt to take any of these sides nor wish to offer any further submissions in the “economic” debate around the 1991 reforms, its intended outcome realisation, or the controversy surrounding their success-failure in reducing absolute poverty levels. A point less echoed and emphasised in the entire discourse and the economic debate is the ‘political’ and ‘political economy’ considerations seen during the India of the 1980s and the 1990s, which seemed far more different, and yet, in some ways, quite similar to the ‘political’ and ‘political economy’ context of our times.