The Nehru-Era Economic History and Thought & Their Lasting Impact

This book explores India's unique experiment building a socialist economic system alongside a democratic political system. It describes the critical role of Jawaharlal Nehru's socialist thought in the design of this system, how this shaped the economy during his lifetime, and how it has continued to influence policy decisions ever since.

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India's economic model underwent transformational change following independence in 1947. The country's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, embarked upon two foundational projects to build modern India: a political project aimed at establishing democracy with universal suffrage, and an economic one aimed at ending poverty. Three-quarters of a century later, his political project is a resounding success, but the opposite is true of the economic one.

The Nehru-Era Economic History and Thought & Their Lasting Impact examines the evolution of Nehru's economic philosophy with socialism, self-sufficiency, and heavy-industry development at its core. Through extensive archival research, Arvind Panagariya reconstructs and reinterprets this history, paying particular attention to the administrative processes deployed to implement policies, contemporary economic thought, and important historical events not adequately covered in the existing literature. He assesses the evolution of Nehru's own political beliefs and the construction of the Nehru development model, the resulting regime and exclusionary nature of economic growth, and the lasting intellectual legacy of the Nehru-era socialism on politicians, civil servants, policy analysts, and businesspeople in the six decades since Nehru's death.

This book is the fascinating tale of a model with the near-unanimous approval of experts from all around the world at its inception and the impact of its failure.