6 highlights
- “Do you have frequent power cuts here?” Chippy asked. Since Uttarakhand was carved out of Uttar Pradesh, electricity supply has been pretty reliable.1
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As the world develops increasing degrees of complexity, only large markets can offer the range of products and services we take for granted in a metropolis.
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Self-sufficiency is a prescription for little choice, high prices, and poor lives. We’ve seen this movie before, those of us whose lives were governed by the Import-substitution model of the Indian economy.
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There’s no going back to that time. One wonders, then, what to make of the government’s mantra of Atmanirbharta.
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In the early decades of independent India, high import barriers and subsidised manufacturing were justified by the ‘Infant Industry’ argument - that colonisation had crippled our ability to compete in global markets, and we needed the umbrella of protection to grow that competence.
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Today’s political narrative of a resurgent India would not permit the use of words such as ‘infant’ - or even ‘immature’ - to describe our manufacturing sector, but the manner in which we are retreating from free trade shows a diminishing sense of confidence. Rather than administering the hard pills of economic reform, we have reached for the easy nostrums of protectionism.
Footnotes
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Is UP’s power supply infrastructure that reliable? ↩