This is an interesting non fiction which gives a very realistic view on how Indian economy has progressed post independence. I had loads of aha moments while reading it since i did not know quite a few things about why India took a slow path to prosperity. While the country was freed from britishers , it was then put into the hands of Nehru clan whose ideology gave birth to useless PSUs, beaurocracy and no tolerance and acceptance for free prosperity. The transformation era started with Narsimha Rao government which let the wings to the aspirations of the budding entrepreneurs by abolishing license raj and opening doors for FDI. The writer has narrated the story as he has seen during his lifetime. Gurcharan Das, who is an accomplished executive, writer and a free lancing consultant writes about the economic transformation as experienced by him. The incidents in the book are realistic and one can relate to the hardships faced by the entrepreneurs in India during Nehru clan.
All in all the book is a very interesting read. I was hooked to it and i enjoyed it. The story is sequenced well and personal experience makes the work more lively. The writer is a big supporter of capitalism and free economy, the current economic crisis might put him under scanner, but he makes sense and i do endorse that capitalism is the way to life. Prosperity spreads prosperity, may be a little bit of control is needed, but not the one that Nehru envisioned for India. A wrong leader can ruin the nation and we just held one for 2 decades.
1 comment:
I strongly suggest that you should also read "India After Gandhi" from Ramcharan Guha. There is lot more to Indian history post 1947 than the "License Raj" and the so-called crippled economy. For the first few years, priorities for the nation were certainly different than simply economic growth. What Nehru and his PSU and 5-year-plan economy gave India was the strong footing on which India actually grew rapidly till 1960s, after which war, famine and misuse of policies put the spoke in the wheel. For a nation ravaged by partition and communal hatred, threatened by disintegration into 500 princely states, millions of people with literacy rate of just 30s and unprecedented economic inequality stemming from centuries of oppression, the heavy hand of socialist economy actually worked well.
Its plain simple facts, and nobody personal opinions. As the years passed by, the feeling of nation-building faded away, society got corrupt and India had to see dark ages from late 60s to early 90s.
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