For a sustainable economic growth

India's growth performance since1991 has been characterised by some economists as “on the growth turnpike”, “India's turn,” and “India the emerging giant”. Pulapre Balakrishnan's book, apart from surveying the country's economic history since Independence, projects what can be expected in the near future. Balakrishnan views growth as an endogenous cumulative change and uses the ‘analytical growth narrative' methodology to study India's growth. He partitions the period since 1950 into three sub-periods — namely, 1950-64, 1965-91, and post-1991 — based partly on the policy regime in vogue and partly on the political configuration, since both evolved.

MORIBUND ECONOMY
Commenting on the Nehru-Mahalanobis planning strategy that focusses only on the supply side, he says that the Nehru era witnessed the revival of a moribund economy and the lighting of a growth process that has remained undimmed for over five decades, during which the rate of growth hastened slowly. The 1965-91 time span witnessed exogenous shocks, including war, drought, and a steep rise in petroleum prices. The Indian state had to come to terms with reduced autonomy and at the same time persist with an interventionist economic policy. The author finds that the Green Revolution not only placed food production permanently on a higher growth trajectory but, through forward and backward linkages, energised the rest of the economy. The growth of the manufacturing sector decelerated in the mid-Sixties and remained depressed for the next decade and a half. He attributes the fast growth of the services sector to a widening income inequality, a faster growth of employment under government, and the impact of the regulatory environment on the supply side of the economy.

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