Pulin B Nayak

Our policymakers face a dilemma: should we have adequate food and nutrition for all or should we have world-class airport terminals? In an ideal world, one could possibly have them both. But if there are limited resources and there is a question of setting priorities, then surely it should be possible to hold the view that the former should get precedence. Well-trained neoclassical economists can often employ much abstract modelling to prove the opposite.


In Praise of Economic Reforms Pulin B Nayak This book is about the reform process in the Indian economy initiated in 1991. This is a competent account and the reader stands to learn much from a close reading of the book. The sequence of events leading up to the start, and even the inevitability, of the reform process is well adumbrated. This is however not to say that one need straightaway agree with every nuance of the analysis that the authors have to offer. Though there are many who may claim to be the intellectual progenitors of the reform process it would perhaps not be incorrect to say that the two principals amongst them are the then finance minister Manmohan Singh and his political mentor and the then prime minister Narasimha Rao. There is no denying that the Indian economy at the beginning of 1991 was in the midst of a deep fiscal crisis as well as a payments crisis in the external sector. The fiscal crisis was the result of decade-long spell of extravagance in government expenditure, both at the central and state levels, running substantially ahead of available resources. The foreign trade sector was beset with poor showing on the export front coupled with rising foreign exchange outgo owing principally to sharp increases in oil prices.

Human Rights The Right to Development: Reflections on the First Four Reports of the Independent Expert on the Right to Development edited by Franciscans International, Geneva, January 2003.

Pulin B Nayak Given the obviously deleterious consequences of last year's economic policy initiatives one might have expected the government to be more circumspect in pushing further the liberalisation drive. But in fact the latest budget presses forward on a number of proposals that were initiated eight months earlier. The hope presumably is that good results will come about as the process of structural reforms works itself through. But this is unlikely to come about in a number of vital areas.