Kaushik Basu

A bit of false advertising in the book blurb. I expected something of a memoir of Basu's work as Chief Economic Advisor in India. Stories, anecdotes, policy decisions—an inside look at the work of a government economist. There is very little of that. Instead, this is largely a dry presentation of standard economics, occasionally tied to India but rarely tied to anything Basu did.

> Sky-high tariffs blocked imports. Scarred by the East India Company, which came to trade with India in the seventeenth century and stayed on to rule the nation for more than two centuries, we blocked foreign direct investment (FDI) from coming in from any multinational corporation to India. And to make sure that these barriers were not violated we strung the economy up in rules, regulations, and permits. India used to be referred to as the "permit raj."

> Her ideology was a broadly socialist one, though the term "socialism," as always in India, was used loosely to connote a redistributive system with reliance on heavy industry, rather than in the original sense of ownership of the means of production being in the hands of the state. It is during this phase of "Indira Gandhi Ι" that we find her nationalizing banks and attempting to nationalize grain trade

> Despite the success of the economy, Indira Gandhi's Emergency began running into trouble soon enough. Indians were already too used to democratic rights to tolerate the indiscriminate silencing of voices of dissent and the imprisonment of opposition leaders. The anger started mounting. Then a program of forced family planning, coordinated by Sanjay Gandhi, had a massive negative backlash. The government's popularity was clearly on the wane. In 1977 Indira Gandhi announced something that few leaders at the peak of authoritarian control ever did—a free and open election. Many felt it was her hubris that led her to believe that the opposition to her came from a minority elite and that, put to vote, she would win. As it happened, she lost the election.

> As the preceding account makes amply clear, the period from 1991 to 1993 represents a watershed in India's economic development and a large part of the credit for this goes to the then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh. Since I write this soon after the fall of a government led by Singh as prime minister, I am aware that most readers today will be in no mood to pay tribute to him… (meer)