ECONOMIC CRISIS

The worrisome aspect is that India today faces a double whammy: That is, the gravely damaging Covid-19 pandemic, which is debilitating the nation, coupled with a pre-existing and rapidly developing economic crisis due to past flawed policies that have already hugely emaciated the financial system.

The good news is that the current developing economic crisis does not necessarily mean an irreversible collapse of the economy. In the last 73 years, India has always come out of several economic crises, once these were acknowledged as such, and then dealt with, bereft of any self-deluding spin, and by instituting urgent reform. The Green Revolution of the late 1960s and the economic reforms of the early 1990s are examples of this fact.

Thus, the food crisis of 1965-67 led to the Green Revolution and food selfsufficiency. The foreign exchange crisis of 1990-91 [when I had just become Minister] led to economic reforms by Narasimha Rao based on my blueprints of March 1991 [when the Chandrashekhar Cabinet had adopted it], which called for moving away from Soviet socialism to a market system based on incentives and thus led to unprecedented high GDP growth rates, rising from a 3.5% annual rate of four decades [1950 to 1990], to 8.5% in 1995-96.

The situation of crisis in the Indian economy today is also, according to this writer, retrievable and that turnaround can be achieved within three months after certain “real”, and not cosmetic, economic policy changes.

The nation today has been