Adarsh Kishore: India - The emerging giant, or has it emerged?

The latest book by Prof. Arvind Panagariya, India: The Emerging Giant (Oxford University Press, 2008), has generated ample interest among the academia and policy makers, both in India and abroad. This is of course expected. As The Economist in its March 8, 2008, issue observed, for publishers, India's emergence has become something of an emerging market in its own right. The present piece flags some issues that come out as reflection triggered by the book.

 

Panagariya's book is a worthy sequel to the works of Professors Jagdish Bhagwati, Padma Desai, and T N Srinivasan. The successes (as well as their absence) since the 1990s have been documented in great detail, presenting his original evidence in addition to surveying the existing body of works. However, as admitted by the author himself, the book, out of necessity, loses out on some of the situational complexity