A tangible gain of two decades of economic reform is that a growing number of global companies have decided to make India their research hub or have scaled up their research and development (R&amp;D) presence in the country considerably. This is, after all, the era of disruptive reverse innovation and frugal engineering in which products developed for the bottom of the pyramid in emerging economies, like India and China, are sold even in developed countries.

N Chandra Mohan: Power plays in R&D

Business Standard

India&rsquo;s free trade agreement with the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), which kicked off two years ago, is an integral part of the country&rsquo;s Look East policy of integrating with a wider pan-Asian economic community encompassing China, Japan, Korea and India. At a time when the World Trade Organisation trade talks are going nowhere, the effort to put in place a regional bloc rivalling the European Union in terms of income and the North American Free Trade Area in trade commends itself. Although a substantial market for trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) has opened up, physical connectivity issues remain to be addressed.

N Chandra Mohan: Build bridges to Look East

Union Minister for Labour and Employment Mallikarjun Kharge observed that &ldquo;despite the global slowdown, India not only maintained its employment standards but also succeeded in reducing unemployment from 8.3 per cent in 2004-05 to 6.6 per cent in 2009-10&rdquo;. Addressing a conference on innovation in public employment programmes, he attributed this to the success of public employment policies and stimulus measures initiated in response to the 2008-09 crisis.

N Chandra Mohan: Jobs in the times of crisis

A wish for 2012 is that the UPA government bestirs itself to strengthen the machinery for gathering statistics, the credibility of which has taken some knocking of late. Earlier, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor had expressed doubts about the reliability of basic statistics: the frequent adjustments to GDP growth estimates, volatility in industrial production indices and inflation data are bound to affect policy formulation and research.

N Chandra Mohan: Poverty of reliable numbers 

As the population shift accelerates from villages to the cities, India is becoming less and less an agrarian economy. But this process of modern development is far from peaceful or orderly. It is, in fact, highly conflict-prone since land acquisition for setting up factories, dams and highways are being contested by villagers, including tribals, who believe their land is being acquired &ndash; mostly by the Indian State &ndash; for a song. Land acquisition has cast a long shadow over the largest foreign direct investment deal in steel. The project to manufacture the world&rsquo;s cheapest car was also forced to relocate to another state due to land troubles.

N Chandra Mohan: How the land lies

Over the last two decades, which are coterminous with the era of economic reforms, India&rsquo;s GDP growth has accelerated, making it the second-fastest growing economy in the world. But it has had a highly regressive impact since inter-state disparities, for instance, have tended to widen even more than before. Although the rising tide of growth has lifted all boats, the faster-growing, richer states have steadily pulled apart from the slower-growing, poorer states. Although this growing divergence has been observed during earlier periods as well, factors responsible for it are not fully understood.

N Chandra Mohan