The Failure of the Neo-liberal Regime in India

The neoliberal turning point in India was marked the adoption of economic reforms and liberalization policies in the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1991. “1991” was a watershed moment of “great historical significance.” The story of “1991,” however, is not singular. In fact, there are many interpretations of India’s neoliberal turn. This paper, a literature review of the various economic, political, and social explanations of and theories on “1991,” presents a synthesis of four separate “1991” storylines. This composite of stories is not meant to act as a normative classificatory schema—that is, four coherent and distinct interpretations of 1991 into which the literature can be cleanly categorized. Instead, it acts as an interpretive schema, inferred from the literature, which tries to both give an account of what happened while articulating four analytically distinct explanatory logics of “1991.” Which is to say that the stories represent somewhat distinct strands of explanations of the neoliberal turn. These storylines will discuss some of the prominent literature on interpretations of “1991” while also try to give a sense of how they either complement or critique each other.

Nrttva-The Anthropology, 2013

The process of subjugation by global capital in the context of North-South interaction regarding development or economic reform of the south is found to be quite smooth. This smooth and easy conquest calls for serious investigation on the development and reform process itself. We need a different discourse to address the synthetic hegemony of the global capital. In this context, the reluctance of neo mainstream economists to ventilate views that are critical of economic reform set in motion by the successive central and state governments from 1991 is quite unfortunate. However, it is also exasperating to see respected radical academicians who appears to be critical of the expansion of global capital, find it so convenient to justify the same in case to case basis, and thereby submit before the false logic of market propagated by the agents of global capital. This paper attempts to be critical of the process of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation initiated in the name of economic reforms in 1991 altogether in a different perspective.

World Review of Political Economy, 2023

His area of interest includes critical development studies and Marxian political economy. He is the co-editor of Global Political Economy: A Critique of Contemporary Capitalism (2022). He has published widely in reputed international and national academic journals.

Routledge, 2018

Series: Routledge/Edinburgh South Asian Studies Series This book presents a reappraisal of the political economic history of the CPIM/Left Front regime against the backdrop of the Indian reform experience. It examines two distinct areas: the conditions that necessitated the regime to engineer a transition from an erstwhile agricultural-based growth model to a more pro-market economic agenda post-1991, and the political strategy employed to manage such a transition, attract private capital and at the same time sustain the regime's traditional rhetoric and partisan character.

The post-reform era has transformed the country into an emerging neoliberal superpower, but India’s market liberalization strategy has led to a social crisis, leaving poorer classes in a perpetual state of immiseration. This paper will acknowledge the three areas of failure that contribute to the further systematic oppression of the poor in Indian society. These are: inhibited economic equality and disproportionate growth, a disregarded agriculture sector, and caste oppression. The paper will go into failed policy initiatives as well as recommendations to rectify these problems.

Polarizing Development, eds. Thomas Marois and Lucia Pradella, 2014

Modern India’s relationship with the capitalist world economy has been through three broad phases. First, British colonialism ruined a flourishing textile industry in India and converted the country into a source of raw materials for its own manufacturing industry, forcing India into the position of a colony subordinate to an imperial power. Second, the post-independence Indian National Congress (hereafter Congress) government embarked on a process of industrialisation in an economy that was heavily protected though not completely cut off from global capital. The third period, globalisation and neoliberalism, is usually traced to the economic liberalisation of 1991, when India began a process of re-integration into the world economy. This chapter will sketch an outline for each of these three periods, introducing the social forces and struggles that could constitute the basis for moving forward from neoliberalism to an economy where production is for need, not profit, and working people control their lives and work.

The Journal of Asian Studies, 2002

Human Geography, 2013

This paper examines the tensions and contradictions within the Indian state in its production of socio-economic policies. Pressure of global governance institutions, multinational corporations, and neoliberal states of the global North that back such corporations, have been instrumental in the production of -friendly economic policy in India. Additionally, in representing the interest of the national bourgeois, the Indian state has been receptive to ideas that favor marketization of the economy. However, public pressure, where the poor constitute the majority of the Indian population, has compelled the Indian state to also strengthen welfare. In examining this contradiction of the simultaneous production of neoliberal and welfare policy, we analyze the case of the public distribution system (which is being marketized) on the one hand, and the employment guarantee scheme (that demonstrates strengthening of welfare) on the other.

Journal of Poverty, Investment and Development, 2018

Since independence, India had followed the mixed economy framework by combining the advantages of the market economic system with those of the planned economic system. India's economic reforms began slowly in the 1980s, and then accelerated under the pressure of an external crisis with internal impact at the beginning of the 1990s. But over the years, the economic policy enacted in 1991 resulted in the establishment of a variety of rules and laws which were aimed at controlling and regulating the economy and instead evidently ended up hampering the process of growth and development. India's future productivity is premised largely on the available institutions being involved in successfully assessing, evaluating, directing through planned policy and information, all activities within an effective and comprehensive national developmental plan and therefore; liberal, safe and flexible legal environment needs to be created. However, on the other hand, it is also important to see that the fruits of development should reach to the downtrodden people of society. The ultimate goal of Legal Reforms and Economic Development should be "Social Justice and Public Welfare". Considering the prevailing socio-legal-political and economic dynamics of India this paper aims at understanding that how the governmental policies and laws which came into being as a result of Economic Reform of 1991 impact the citizens of the country and industrial world that is whether the policies bring about changes in the interest of the country as a whole or whether there is infringement of people's rights.

2017

This paper assesses the origins and the consequences of the decisive right wing shift in Indian politics ushered in by the 2014 elections. Tracing this to long-term but not linearly developing tendencies in Indian politics, the paper relates these with the distinctive nature and history of capitalist development in India, particularly the sharply polarizing growth and accumulation regime of the neo-liberal era and the crisis it now confronts. Asserting that the electoral success of the Narendra Modi-led BJP was based on it being the political agent of not change but of a reassertion by India’s economic elite, the paper explains the challenge of managing sharply contradictory interests that this places in the path of the consolidation of the new regime.