India Unbound

Gurcharan Das ran Procter and Gamble India and wrote this history of the Indian economy from independence to 2000, interleaving national policy with his own career. The structure moves through three periods: the Nehruvian planning years, the tightening controls of the 1960s and 1970s, and the liberalisation that began in 1991 under Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh.

Das's argument is that India's licence raj suppressed growth not primarily through public ownership but through the permit system governing private firms. He gives concrete detail from his own experience: the time required to obtain approval to expand capacity, the incentive to lobby rather than to compete, the protection of incumbents against entry, and the quality consequences of guaranteed markets. He contrasts this with the post-1991 period, when import liberalisation and the removal of industrial licensing exposed Indian firms to competition and, in his account, revealed entrepreneurial capacity that had been present all along.

The book is optimistic in a way that the subsequent twenty-five years have partly justified and partly not; India's growth accelerated, but the manufacturing employment Das expected did not materialise, and the reform agenda stalled in land, labour and financial markets. Das is also writing from a business perspective and gives limited attention to agricultural policy, to the distributional record, or to the argument that early state investment in heavy industry and technical education created capabilities the later boom used. It remains the most readable single-volume account of what the licence system did to firms.