India's Thwarted Promise
Even as Prime Minister, Singh never made the case for reform.
Source: Hindustan Times/Getty ImagesOn July 26, 1991, Manmohan Singh -- then Finance Minister, and later Prime Minister for 10 years -- rose in Parliament to deliver an address that would transform India. That speech, outlining the first budget of a just-elected government under Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, launched India’s journey of economic reform, dismantling many decades-old socialist-style controls on the private sector.
A quarter-century later, much has changed. India, once cruelly mocked for its “Hindu rate of growth” -- per capita GDP growth of just over 1 percent a year -- is now the fastest-growing large economy in the world. Its economic landscape has been altered completely; it’s no longer the agrarian economy it was in 1991. For citizens who lived through the grey isolation of the decades before “liberalization,” the vibrant and globalized India of today looks and feels like a thoroughly different country.