New Delhi: As India surpassed the United Kingdom this month, to become the fifth largest economy in the world, this new book explores the economic journey that took the nation from a small developing economy to one that’s competing with those of the United States, Japan, Germany and more.
Published by HarperCollins, ‘Reform Nation: From the Constraints of P.V. Narasimha Rao to the Convictions of Narendra Modi’ by Gautam Chikermane will be released on 29 September on Softcover, ThePrint’s online venue to launch non-fiction books.
In his book, ‘Reform Nation: From the Constraints of P.V. Narasimha Rao to the Convictions of Narendra Modi’, the author takes the reader through India’s economic journey from the early days of Indian independence with our closed, self-sustaining and inward-looking economy to the reforms brought about by liberalization in the 1990s.
Chikermane tracks a shift in the dominant role of the state in the growth of the nation’s economy to the rising significance of entrepreneurs and wealth creators who play an essential role in India today. He celebrates India’s path to becoming one of the world’s top economies and looks toward its future of becoming the world’s third-largest within this decade.
Chikermane, who is also the vice-president of Observer Research Foundation (ORF), specialises in subjects such as economics, politics, and foreign policy among others. He has written seven other books such as — Reading Sri Aurobindo (2022), India 2030: The Rise of a Rajasic Nation (2021), 70 Policies that Shaped India: 1947 to 2017, Independence to $2.5 Trillion (2018), The Disrupter: Arvind Kejriwal and the Audacious Rise of the Aam Aadmi (2014) and more.
“Reform Nation establishes how over the years, as the Indian economy grew in scale and confidence, and the outcomes delivered growth and have almost ended extreme poverty, the constraints for reforms during Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s time have turned into convictions for reforms under Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” said Chikermane, while discussing the country’s economic journey through the past 75 years.
Within its roughly 400 pages, Gautam Chikermane explores the major economic reforms designed by various Indian Prime Ministers over the past thirty years. From P.V. Narasimha Rao to Narendra Modi, he gives his insights into a growing India.
From the industrial policies in the early years of independence to the liberalisation of the Indian economy, including demonetisation and GST policies — Chikermane takes the reader through 69 reforms in Indian history. He also examines the future of the country’s economic growth.
Praising Chikermane’s work, Sachin Sharma, executive editor at HarperCollins India, said the book shows how an inward-looking economy like India transforms into “one of the largest economies in the world”.
“Gautam Chikermane has done a phenomenal job of analyzing all major economic reforms under successive governments in the last three decades. He provides a fresh perspective on how the country reached here and what does the future hold for us,” Sharma noted.
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