India : The Political Economy of Reforms

Contents: 1. Introduction/Bibek Debroy and Rahul Mukherji. 2. Ideological contradictions in an era of coalitions: economic policy confusion in the Vajpayee Government/Paranjoy Guha Thakurta. 3. A new development paradigm: employment, entitlement and empowerment/Arvind Virmani. 4. Economic policy in a democratic polity: reforms from Rajiv Gandhi to the 21 century/Mani Shankar Aiyar. 5. The emerging tasks ahead/Amit Mitra and Pyaralal Raghavan. 6. Poverty, food security and human security/Yoginder K. Alagh. 7. Liberalization of electric power in India/Sanjeev S. Ahluwalia. 8. The political economy of power/S.L. Rao. 9. The politics of labour reforms in India/C.S. Venkata Ratnam. 10. Liberalization, reforms and the financial sector: some issues in banking/Saumitra Chaudhuri. 11. Reforming the state: government initiatives and people\'s movements/Samuel Paul. 12. Panchayati Raj: the way forward/Mani Shankar Aiyar. 13. The geography of post-1991 Indian economy/Laveesh Bhandari and Aarti Khare. 14. Reforms and Small Scale Industries in India/Anil Bhardwaj. 15. Small Scale Industries in the liberalized era beg for attention/B. Yerram Raju.

"This book is a collection of seminar papers about the political economy of reforms in India. There is general consensus that the first generation of reforms (concerning primarily the external sector) are over and to take the Indian economy to a higher growth trajectory, one should move on to the second generation, interpreted variously as the domestic sector or state-level reforms. This is where the political economy of resistance takes over and resistance also concerns some amount of stock taking about what the first decade of reforms has achieved. In particular, other than overall issues, the papers in this volume address decentralization, poverty, agriculture, food security, infrastructure (power), the financial sector, Small-Scale Industry, labour markets, regional disparities and countervailing pressure exerted by citizen groups. In the process, the pending agenda is also set out. The book should be of interest to all those interested in Indian economic policy formulation." (jacket)