Economists From India

"Ambedkar is my Father in Economics. He is true celebrated champion of the underprivileged. He deserves more than what he has achieved today. However he was highly controversial figure in his home country, though it was not the reality. His contribution in the field of economics is marvelous and will be remembered forever..!"

"That austerity is a counterproductive economic policy in a situation of economic recession can be seen, rightly, as a “Keynesian critique.” Keynes did argue—and persuasively—that to cut public expenditure when an economy has unused productive capacity as well as unemployment owing to a deficiency of effective demand would tend to have the effect of slowing down the economy further and increasing—rather than decreasing—unemployment. Keynes certainly deserves much credit for making that rather basic point clear even to policymakers, irrespective of their politics, and he also provided what I would call a sketch of a theory of explaining how all this can be nicely captured within a general understanding of economic interdependences between different activities... I am certainly supportive of this Keynesian argument, and also of Paul Krugman’s efforts in cogently developing and propagating this important perspective, and in questioning the policy of massive austerity in Europe. But I would also argue that the unsuitability of the policy of austerity is only partly due to Keynesian reasons. Where we have to go well beyond Keynes is in asking what public expenditure is for—other than for just strengthening effective demand, no matter what its content. As it happens, European resistance to savage cuts in public services and to indiscriminate austerity is not based only, or primarily, on Keynesian reasoning. The resistance is based also on a constructive point about the importance of public services—a perspective that is of great economic as well as political interest in Europe."

"Central to the Smithian approach is our willingness to see critically what we observe around us. The sense of comfort that is often associated with being content with the world as it is can seriously hamper the pursuit of justice. This understanding goes strongly against a line of thought that was powerfully presented by Friedrich Nietzshe. ‘The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad’, said Nietzshe. I think I can, with some effort, understand what Nietzsche meant, but it is hard for me, even with a lot of effort, to see that Nietzshe’s hypothesis helps us to understand the causation or resilience of the nastiness of the world in which we live. Nor, I must insist (this I do as a thoroughly unreligious person), does it offer any obvious insight into the lives and achievements of Martin Luther King, or Mother Theresa, or Desmond Tutu, who have tried to reduce injustice in the world and have done so with non-negligible success."

"The approach presented in my book The Idea of Justice shares the general Enlightenment interest in relying on reasoning in general and public reasoning in particular, and in this respect there is something very substantially in common between the two alternative disciplines of reasoning that emerged from the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment period, that is, between the Hobbesian and Kantian reasoning (with its successors today, such as the Rawlsian social contract approach) and the reasoning of Smith and Condorcet (with its successors today, such as normative social choice theory)."

"Smith distinguishes with great sophistication the different kinds of reasons people have in taking an interest in the lives of others, separating out sympathy, generosity, public spirit and other motivations. Even though he acknowledged the role of mental attitudes and predispositions, he went on to discuss how reasoning, which is at the heart of rationality, must have a big role in preventing us from being – consciously or unconsciously – too self-centred, or thoughtlessly uncaring."

"Smith had no illusion that this would be easy to do, nor did he suffer from the delusion that such an exercise would, in any sense, be perfect. But he did have the conviction that the exercise could still be very useful, and the best should not be made into an enemy of the good."

"The case for combating debilitating inequality in India is not only a matter of social justice. Unlike India, China did not miss the huge lesson of Asian economic development, about the economic returns that come from bettering human lives, especially at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid. India’s growth and its earnings from exports have tended to depend narrowly on a few sectors, like information technology, pharmaceuticals and specialized auto parts, many of which rely on the role of highly trained personnel from the well-educated classes. For India to match China in its range of manufacturing capacity — its ability to produce gadgets of almost every kind, with increasing use of technology and better quality control — it needs a better-educated and healthier labor force at all levels of society. What it needs most is more knowledge and public discussion about the nature and the huge extent of inequality and its damaging consequences, including for economic growth."

"We investigated the working of a number of elementary schools from three districts of West Bengal… The problem is, in some ways, compounded by the fact that school teachers are now comparatively well paid – no longer the recipients of miserably exploitative wages... The salary of teachers in regular schools has gone up dramatically over recent years. This is an obvious cause for celebration at one level (indeed, I remember being personally involved, as a student at Presidency College fifty years ago, in agitations to raise the desperately low prevailing salaries of school teachers). But the situation is now very different. The big salary increases in recent years have not only made school education vastly more expensive (making it much harder to offer regular school education to those who are still excluded from it), but have also tended to draw school teachers as a group further away from the families of children, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. There is considerable evidence that the class barrier that deeply impairs the delivery of school education to the worst-off members of society is now further reinforced by the increase in economic and between the teachers and the poorer (and less privileged) children"

"I saw the first signs of famine in April 1943 - the so called "Great Bengal Famine" which would kill between 2 to 3 million people. Food prices had started rising quite sharply during 1942, the year before the famine. (pg. 114)"

"The continuous cries for help - from children and women and men - ring in my ears, even today seventy-seven years later. (pg. 115)"

"profits made by the East India Company [...] in Bengal, financed [...] wars that the British waged across India in the period of their colonial expansion. (pg. 164)"

"What has been called 'the financial bleeding of Bengal' began very soon after Plassey. (pg. 164)"

"Those who wish to be inspired by the glory of the British Empire would do well to avoid reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations ... (pg. 164)"

"While most of the loot from the financial bleeding accrued to British company officials in Bengal, there was widespread participation by the political and business leadership in Britain: nearly a quarter of the MPs in London owned stocks in the East India Company after Plassey. (pg. 165)"

"Amartya Sen is not Indian. He had lost his Indian-ness after he left his Bengali ex-wife and married two foreign females. He has lived abroad and only visits the country for a couple of months, which cannot make you Indian."

"For Sen is an example of the Indian who becomes famous in the Great World and who wants to make sure that he can never be accused of what in India is called “communalism,” but which really means all those Hindus who are aware of their being Hindus, and aware too of what Islam did to India’s civilization of Hinduism, a way of life and thought rather than a religion as we understand it in the West."

"Amartya Sen converted Nalanda into a club that promotes a certain variant of a modern political agenda in the service of a political party."

"His vision was to industrialize India, to urbanize India, and in the process he hoped that we would create a new society -- more rational, more humane, less ridden by caste and religious sentiments. That was the grand vision that Nehru had."

"Just as the Congress party did not plan the riots, but certain individuals belonging to the party have been accused of them, I have come to know that certain people belonging to the RSS were also named in some FIRs."

"There is no time to lose. Neither the Government nor the economy can live beyond its means year after year. The room for maneuver, to live on borrowed money or time, does not exist any more. Any further postponement of macroeconomic adjustment, long overdue, would mean that the balance of payments situation, now exceedingly difficult, would become unmanageable and inflation, already high, would exceed limits of tolerance."

"That evening, all TV channels dutifully reported the Congress party’s statement that Rahul had asked the PM to extend NREGA to the entire country, and the next morning’s papers did the same. Only the Indian Express made the additional remark in its dispatch the next day that ‘Sources said that this issue had been on the PMO radar even before Rahul’s elevation to the party post....."

"He did not deserve this fate. He has many faults, and I have not hesitated to record them in this book. However, he remains not just a good man but, in the final analysis, also a good prime minister. This is especially true of his first term in office. He is, even at his worst, a cut above the competition, be it from within the ruling Congress party, or would-be prime ministers in other parties. No Congress leader—and I include here the party’s leader Sonia Gandhi and its ‘heir apparent’ Rahul Gandhi—can match his unique combination of personal integrity, administrative experience, international stature and political appeal across a wide swathe of public opinion. These qualities were strikingly evident during the first term of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, from 2004 to 2009 (UPA-1), with Dr Singh at its helm. However, as bad news, largely a series of financial scandals, tumbled out of the UPA’s second term from 2009 (UPA-2), and the media became hostile, his many talents began to recede from public view. Sadly, his own office became ineffective and lost control over the political narrative."

"Rahul could have urged the government to respond to public opinion and let the PM handle the matter on his return to India from an official visit to the US. Instead, he decided to demand the ordinance’s withdrawal, calling it ‘nonsense’ in front of TV cameras, hours before Dr Singh was to call on President Obama. This public display of disrespect to Dr Singh and disregard for the dignity of the office of the prime minister on a day like this was, I felt, reason enough for Dr Singh to call it quits. He chose not to."

"After the elections, Dr Singh did try to be more assertive, taking a view on who would be in his Cabinet and who would not, and resisting the induction of the DMK’s A. Raja and T.R. Baalu, for their unsavoury reputations. Watching from the sidelines, I had hoped he would not buckle under pressure. Dr Singh stood his ground for a day, managed to keep Baalu out, but had to yield ground on Raja under pressure from his own party. To me, it was a reiteration of the message that the victory was not his but the Family’s."

"The way I saw it, if the Congress had lost, the blame for the defeat would have been placed squarely on the PM’s shoulders. It would be said his obsession with the nuclear deal cost the party the support of the Left and the Muslims. His ‘neo-liberal’ economic policies would have been deemed to have alienated the poor. His attempt to befriend Musharraf would have been regarded as having alienated the Hindu vote. A hundred explanations would have been trotted out to pin the defeat on the PM. Now that the party was back in office, and that too with more numbers than anyone in the party had forecast, the credit would go to the party’s ‘first family’. To the scion and future leader. It was Rahul’s victory, not Manmohan’s."

"But when I went back to him with her acceptance, the PM looked sheepish and informed me that he had already agreed to appoint Syeda Hameed, a Muslim writer and social activist, and so, I was told, there was no place left for Anu. Clearly, the ‘gender’ and ‘minority’ boxes had been filled up with Syeda’s appointment. I was left with the embarrassing task of explaining away the confusion to Anu. What I obviously could not say to her was that the political benefits of rewarding a Muslim may well have trumped those of appointing a Parsi! To my dismay, even Dr Singh seemed to take this embarrassment lightly."

"I am an accidental prime minister."

"Country knows...if there is a Prime Minister without the Gandhi family, then he is merely a shadow Prime Minister, a puppet Prime Minister with the strings lying with the 10 Janpath. In such a scenario, the country knew Singh's strings were lying with 10 Janpath."

"India held back a little longer, but an Indian economist, Parth Shah, tells me that the country started looking at what was happening around them, in Taiwan, South Korea and now also China: ‘We saw that they actually changed their model and they did succeed in what they had done, and it was time for India to learn the lesson.’ That was decisive in 1991, when a debt-financed boom crashed and the foreign exchange reserve had shrunk to such a level that India was three weeks from running out of money. The crisis prompted the Minister of Finance Manmohan Singh to quote the nineteenth-century romantic Victor Hugo in parliament: ‘No power on earth can resist an idea whose time has come.’ The idea was to dismantle trade barriers and stifling regulations that held India back and kept half the population in extreme poverty. In the past, economists spoke condescendingly of the ‘Hindu growth rate’ as if there was some kind of complacency built into the country’s tradition that stopped the economy from growing faster than the population. After the reforms of 1991 and those that followed, this culture changed as if by magic and growth took off. Today, average income is three times greater than before reform and extreme poverty is only one-fifth of previous levels."

"It's very simple, Dr. Manmohan Singhji in reality is not a leader, and he has himself said that he is not a leader. The nation cannot be ruled by an academician, it can be run only by a leader. What was Indiraji [Indira Gandhi]'s education was never an issue, but she was a leader. (P. V.) Narasimha Rao was a leader. Only those who know the pulse of the nation can run it. Lal Bahadur Shastri knew the pulse of the nation very well, which is why he was able to leave his imprint on the nation in such a short time. Atal Bihari Vajpayee knew the pulse of the nation, Morarjibhai [Morarji Desai] knew the pulse of the nation, Chandra Shekharji was a mass leader. We also had [[H. D. Deve Gowda|[H. D.] Deve Gowdaji]] who had never left Karnataka, Indra Kumar Gujralji thankfully never made any claims. Manmohan Singhji is like that. That is why I say the nation needs a leader. Dr. Manmohan Singh has not even visited all the states in the five years of his prime ministership, while Advaniji is a leader who has, at some point in time, spent a night in our 400 districts."

"They appointed a night watchman by naming Manmohan Singh as prime minister...the prime minister is nothing but a puppet of the Gandhi family."

"When people talk of integrity, I say the best example is the man who occupies the country's highest office."

"He has been doing a wonderful job in guiding India even prior to being the prime minister along the path of extraordinary economic growth. That is a marvel, I think, for all of the world."

"I want to write to the Guinness Book of World Records that Manmohan Singh is the only Prime Minister of India among the eleven Prime Ministers that the country had who has not won even a municipal election. What is he going to tell me? Manmohan Singh is a nominated Prime Minister. He is not a representative of the people of India."

"Unlike the general perception, Singh is not really a bureaucrat. My personal experience is that he is politically shrewd."

"My brother was always glued to his books, an ardent reader and an educationist."

"Singh and I had developed a warm and productive relationship. While he could be cautious in foreign policy, unwilling to get out too far ahead of an Indian bureaucracy that was historically suspicious of U.S. intentions, our time together confirmed my initial impression of him as a man of uncommon wisdom and decency…. What I couldn’t tell was whether Singh’s rise to power represented the future of India’s democracy or merely an aberration.... In fact, he owed his position to Sonia Gandhi…more than one political observer believed that she’d chosen Singh precisely because as an elderly Sikh with no national political base, he posed no threat to her forty-year-old son, Rahul, whom she was grooming to take over the Congress Party... He feared that rising anti-Muslim sentiment had strengthened the influence of India’s main opposition party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)... In the dim light, he (Singh) looked frail, older than his seventy-eight years, and as we drove off I wondered what would happen when he left office. Would the baton be successfully passed to Rahul, fulfilling the destiny laid out by his mother and preserving the Congress Party’s dominance over the ‘divisive nationalism’ touted by the BJP?"

"Former PM Manmohan Singh said people in the last line have first right to resources, and factually, Indian Muslims are in the last line."

"P. V. Narasimha Rao always tried to take the opposition into confidence. To cite a few examples, he had deputed Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the leader of the Indian delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva to discuss Pakistan-sponsored resolution to censure India on its record of human rights in Jammu & Kashmir, which was successfully thwarted. He had also nominated Shri Subramanian Swamy as Chairman of the Commission on Labour Standards and International Trade, with a Cabinet-rank."

"I have to acknowledge that my successor has been a more adept salesman, event manager and communicator than me."

"I can say in all humility that I have not used my public office to enrich myself, enrich my family or to enrich my friends."

"Japan is at the heart of India’s Look East Policy. It is also a key partner in our economic development and in our quest for a peaceful, stable and prosperous Asia and the world. Anchored in our shared values and interests, the partnership between a strong and economically resurgent Japan and a transforming and rapidly growing India can be an effective force of good for the region."

"On 3rd July 2004, he remarked, “I am distressed by the low representation of minorities, particularly the Muslim minority, in many walks of life, both in the public and the private sector. I do not need to underline to this audience the gravity of the problem that this creates for our collective effort to create a truly inclusive and tolerant society, where the benefits of economic development are shared by all citizens."

"We speak about cooperation but seem hesitant to commit ourselves to a global offensive to root out terrorism, with the pooling of resources, exchange of information, sharing of intelligence, and the unambiguous unity of purpose required. This must change. We do have a global coalition against terrorism. We must give it substance and credibility, avoiding selective approaches and political expediency."

"If our commitment to remain an open society is one of the pillars of our nationhood, the other is our commitment to remain an open economy. An economy that guarantees the freedom of enterprise, respects individual creativity, and at the same time mobilizes public investment for social infrastructure and the development of human capabilities. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to suggest that these are the principles to which all countries will increasingly want to adhere. In relating to the world, we must never lose sight of this vital aspect of our Nationhood."

"When we talk of a resurgent Asia, people think of the great changes that have come about in Shanghai. I share this aspiration to transform Mumbai in the next five years in such a manner that people would forget about Shanghai and Mumbai will become a talking point."

"There is no doubt that our grievances against the British Empire had a sound basis for. As the painstaking statistical work of the Cambridge historian Angus Maddison has shown, India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6% in 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3% at that time, to as low as 3.8% in 1952. Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th Century, "the brightest jewel in the British Crown" was the poorest country in the world in terms of per capita income."

"I wish President Musharraf well, we want to work with him to bring greater balance in our own relations. But I have to be realistic enough to recognize the role that terrorist elements have played in the last few years in the history of Pakistan. Taliban was the creation of Pakistan extremists, the Wahabi Islam which has flourished, thousands and thousands of schools, the madrassas, were set up to preach this jihad based on hatred of other religions . . . and Pakistan is not a democracy in the sense that we know and you know. . . . We wish Pakistan success in emerging as a moderate Muslim state. We will work with President Musharraf . . . but we have to recognize what has happened."

"We will have to devise innovative plans to ensure that minorities, particularly the Muslim minority, are empowered to share equitably the fruits of development. These must have the first claim on resources."

"I am delighted to hear the popularity of Odori Maharaja among young people here. Our children were delighted to see Odori Asimo - the dancing robot!"