Picking a Policy
Montek Singh Ahluwalia’s book, Backstage , is (in his words): “A travelogue of India’s journey of economic reforms, in which I had the privilege of being an insider for 30 long years.” At college, he loved to debate. In real life: “I realized the art of persuasion is very different from the art of debating, and much more challenging.” It is easy to criticize Soviet style central planning. But only with hindsight, says Ahluwalia . In Nehru’s time, central planning seemed to be working – it had transformed the USSR from a “feudal society into an industrial power within a few decades”. In fact, in the 1960’s, several top American economists felt that it was entirely possible that the Soviet planning could make their national income higher than America’s by the end of the century! Ahluwalia’s stint at the World Bank (WB) “would give me first-hand experience of development problems in a range of developing countries”. WB aid to countries came with terms and conditions ar