Contents: Preface. 1. From gradual to galloping liberalisation: a journey to nowhere and withering of developmental state in India/Kamal Nayan Kabra. 2. The economic slowdown: growing disparities, globalisation and the black economy/Arun Kumar. 3. Regional growth and disparities/Ravi S. Srivastava. 4. Agriculture/Pramod K. Chaubey. 5. Agricultural labourers/S.P. Singh. 6. Industry/T. Ravi Kumar. 7. Sickness in Indian industry/Pushpa Kumari. 8. Public enterprises/R.K. Mishra, B. Navin and P. Geeta. 9. Privatisation/Ashok Rao. 10. Financial sector/Hari Om Verma. 11. 2002-03 budget/Atul Sood. 12. Stock market/K.S. Chalapati Rao. 13. Balance of payments/Sunanda Sen. 14. External sector/Manmohan Krishna. 15. Intellectual property regime/Biswajit Dhar. 16. Telecom/Arun Mehta. 17. Prices and the PDS/V. Upadhyay. 18. Hunger and starvation/Shalini Kala and Aasha Kapur Mehta. 19. The urban sector/T.M. Thomas. 20. Unemployment/P.K. Chaubey. 21. Employment and casualisation/Bansari Choudhury. 22. Gender issues/Navsharan Singh. 23. Higher education/Jandhyala B.G. Tilak. 24. Elementary education/Sadhna Saxena. 25. Health/Alpana Sagar and Imrana Qadeer. 26. Media/Sanjay Kapoor. 27. Labour’s resistance to reforms/Souparna Lahiri. 28. Governance/Kamala Prasad. 29. Reforms, governance and the state of the people/Dolly Arora. Boxes: 1. Economic reforms in India and China/Kamal Nayan Kabra. 2. Industrial policy changes since 2001. 3. Concentration in cement industry/Pushpa Kumari. 4. Criminal intelligence digest/A.K. Gupta. 5. People’s electoral verdict against liberalisation/Rekha Saxena.
"The Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) has completed more than a decade. The Indian state brought upon itself an acute intensification of the chronic fiscal and balance of payments difficulties. The statist economic growth model in force during the 1950-1990 in its various avatars was increasingly made nominal, friendly and subservient to the market forces: it was demonised as the root cause of the crisis of macro-economic management in early 1991. The steadily worsening crisis of the denial of a secure livelihood and basic democratic rights formed no part of this perspective. Ignoring this wider social goal, the economic and financial ‘crisis’ was used as a ploy to trigger off a series of far-reaching changes in the policy objectives, instruments and directions desired by global multinational agencies and organisations and a large chunk of India’s big capital. It was an attempt to make India speedily and stealthily redesign her economy, polity, society and culture bypassing mass political approval. This represents, in a nutshell, an unfortunate saga of the disempowerment of popular forces and an emptying of Indian politics of its limited democratic content, leaving only the form.
"For a no-holds-barred execution of these unjust hegemonic designs, a sustained campaign of disinformation, regimentation, cultural conditioning and severe street violence is deployed with a systematic regularity. The official Economic Survey of the government is increasingly being used for sugarcoating the bitter pill of liberalisation."
