It was he (PV) who dictated the original draft and got an enthusiastic P Chidambaram and a somewhat reluctant Manmohan Singh to sign on to it as its co-champions.
Published Feb 09, 2024 | 7:30 PM ⚊ Updated Feb 09, 2024 | 7:49 PM
PV Narasimha Rao has been awarded the Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian honour in India. (Supplied)
Of the political Bharat Ratnas bestowed in recent days, former prime minister PV Narasimha Rao’s was possibly the most deserved and long overdue.
The award to Dr MS Swaminathan is in a different class. To those who knew him and saw him up close, there is a tendency to judge him by his penchant for astrologers and soothsayers like Chandraswami and businessmen like the Hindujas.
However, PV Narasimha Rao was much more than that. From a long view of history, he was the leader who induced the moment of inflection in the economic trajectory of India.
The blueprint to liberalise the economy had its origin in the waning days of VP Singh’s tenure as prime minister, but it never got a serious discussion as his political priorities dominated his vision.
It was still a piece of paper during Chandrashekhar’s short tenure as the prime minister.
The credit for the liberalisation of the Indian economy must rightly go to PV Narasimha Rao. It was he who dictated the original draft and got an enthusiastic P Chidambaram and a somewhat reluctant Manmohan Singh to sign on to it as its co-champions.
The centrepiece of the liberalisation was the scrapping of the Industrial Licensing Policy of 1956, which ushered in a planned economy in India. The Act that dispensed with the licence-permit raj was stunning in its boldness.
It was the removal in one fell stroke of the all-powerful and highly opinionated Directorate General of Technical Development (DGTD) from the licensing system.
The DGTD, till then, was the overlord of the Leonteiff model of central planning, where faceless bureaucrats determined the production of even nuts and bolts.
This bureaucratic army of technically qualified was so mindless and lacking in imagination that they had determined that India only needed a few hundred computers each year in the 1900s. This opened the floodgates of aspirations and ambitions and gave rise to a new entrepreneurial class.
Only the Tatas from that age remain in the top 20 of Indian business houses. We have seen the expansion of the Indian economy since 1991. It has been a relentless climb, and today, India can catch a glimmer of its tryst with destiny.
The credit for this must only go to PV Narasimha Rao. The Bharat Ratna was long overdue, and the credit for that must go to PM Narendra Modi, even if he meant it to stick a pin in Sonia Gandhi, who is generally held to be the one who denied our Telugu bidda his rightful due.
(The author was the former economic advisor to the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. Views expressed are personal.)
