Three decades of economic reforms: The Federal's '30-way' perspective
There are dramatic accounts of a time when the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) pledged 46.91 tonnes of gold with the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan to raise $400 million, though the government repurchased it months later as the situation improved. India managed to get a breather with the first tranche of $755 million from the IMF, but that was hardly enough. The year was 1991.
Read here: The Federal’s Liberalisation@30 Series
There are stories since then about how the country unleashed a series of economic reforms. Rewind to the year 2009. With Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister, India bought 200 tonnes of gold valued at $6.7 billion to diversify its assets – the wheel of fortune came a full circle. As far as government coffers are concerned, as of July 2, 2021, the country’s foreign exchange reserves stood at a record $610.01 billion.
That’s only a small part of what happened since 1991, the year when the country unleashed far-reaching economic liberalization. In the ‘explosion of choices’ since then, India has had the good, the bad, and in some cases, ugly face of the country’s onward march to economic reforms.
The Federal revisits the trials and tribulations of the three decades in its attempt to reflect the prospects of progress, the trajectory of growth, and decline and the power to rise again despite tough choices. Click here for The Federal’s 30 well-researched articles by Alam Srinivas that offer a unique perspective of all that has happened and that could happen:
