Customer Reviews

India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution from Independence to the Global Information Age

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book presents a picture of India's Economic and Business stroy from just before Independence in 1947 till about 2001. Mr Das uses his family members as a chorus to present the story in the early days, and then transitions to his own experiences as a manager in Richardson Hindustan, where he had a ringside view of the business climate in India during the 70s and 80s and later.

He captures the initial euphoria over independence and the sense of control Indians felt over their own destiny, which led to Nehru's implementation of a centrally planned economy, with most important industries nationalized, and private enterprise being severly shacked, and "profit" being a dirty word.

Some of the chapters in this book are almost like business cases/narratives which present the journey of different business houses, like the Tatas or the Ambanis as they tried to run business and navigate the suffocating bureaucratic maze that the planned economy gave rise to. His contention is that while Nehru may have made a mistake, the real blunder was in continuing with the planned economy model after his death even when it was abundantly clear that it was not working.

He leads up to the balance of payments crisis, with the resultant changes in the Indian economy caused by liberalization by Narsimha Rao and Manmohan Singh, who appear to him to be apologetic reformers almost unaware of the monumental changes they were unleashing. Finally, he notes the frustration that the economy has not continued to open up as quickly as it had started to, now that the crisi has passed. However, he notes that there is a sense of widespread optimism that is driving change all over India.

Therefore, this book is a businessman's perspective on business history in post-independence India.

(Some of the reviewers have noted that this book does not present a balanced picture, by not presenting either the roadblocks still present, of the tremendous social and economic inequities. True, but that is not its purpose. Unless India has a vibrant business environment, it cannot generate enough opportunities for those willing to work, or enough surplus for those who need help. Thus, in that sense, I think that allowing business to do its job (with adequate institutional supervision for ethical and environmental behaviour) is the foundation on which other social objectives can be built. Anyway, Mr Das is not foremost a social entrepreneur, nor is he a social activist, even though his work must touch upon those areas. He has written about what he knows first hand, and done a great job.)

This book gives an in-depth look at the follies of past governmental policies in India while tracing substantial changes in the nation's economic plans within the last ten years--allowing for the opening of markets and a competitive stance in the global arena by India. He outlines the failures of Nehru's idealistic approach, along with Mrs. Gandhi's autocratic regime. It also shows the potential for further opportunity with the change of the economic environment via globalization. It does have a few weaknesses--capitalism is exhorted as a panacea for India's dilemmas. And the image presented is overly rosy--the book only gives half of the picture and is unfounded in its optimism with regards to India's future via its current path. Abraham George's "India Untouched: The Forgotten Face of Rural Poverty" and P. Sainath's "Everybody Loves A Good Drought" are excellent counter-points to the issues presented in this volume.

This book covers India over a broad enough frame of time .. the last 50 years since Independence. Since the author has worked in industry .. his views have a practical perspective. It also throws light on doyens of Indian industry the Birlas, the Tatas , the Amabanis.. and their efforts to power growth and simultaneously battle the bureaucracy.
The author has made a convincing attempt at pointing out the ills of bureaucracy and licensing .. and their effects in keeping economic growth down.

The book makes good reading , an understanding of fundamental economics is unnecessary and anyone who has an interest in India should find this book a very good read .

Every book has its votaries. So does this one. It comes at a time when millions of upwardly mobile, English-speaking, urban Indians are reaping the benefits of the economic reforms that the book speaks of. So it strikes a strong chord with Indians who have seen decades of lop-sided development since independence and a sudden boom in the 1990s.

As an incisive analysis of defects of bureaucracy and over-regulation it has some merit. But the author carefully selects only those facts of pre-liberalization era which he can easily criticize and only those facts of the liberalization era, he can praise without having a nagging conscience.

Therein lies the trap. By refusing to give due wieghtage to achievements of previous decades and refusing to analyze how those achievements laid down the base infrastructure for subsequent growth, the author does a very lop-sided economic analysis of how the liberalization boom came about.

A lot of far-sighted planning in terms of education, development of the transport network, etc. laid the foundation for the economic boom and not just the flip of a policy decision.

Of course, growth that could have been accelerated was slowed down by wrong policies and a dominating and corrupt bureaucracy, but a growth which could have been aborted was given a lease of life by a commitment of many Indian leaders and bureaucrats with vision.

For a sense of how we have progressed and why, a balanced inquiry based on statistics and not skewed by needs of proving the 'hypothesis' would be better.

It would also be good to read this book, along with P. Sainath's 'Everybody Loves a Good Drought' or Pavan Varma's 'The Great Indian Middle Class' to know the other side of the coin and understand how different kinds of Indians respond to the same set of developments.

A well written and passionate summary of economic and political changes in India since independence. It was an eye-opener in many ways: readers of Ayn Rand would appreciate parallels to situations described in Atlas Shrugged. Coming from a former CEO of P&G India, the book offers a useful perspective on economic policies and changes over the last few decades. Though often repititive in its ranting against policies of earlier Indian governments, the book is still fairly engrossing.

Gursharan Das' book mixes autobiography, social and political observation and economic history to tell the capitalist's story of India from 1947 to the present.

Das is a great writer-- he can make even economic history interesting!-- and provides so much huamn detail that the larger issues jump to life. There is the guy working the Delhi bazaar who took seventeen rupees and turned it into a billion dolalr worldwide industrial concern, the man hired to reuild India's telecom system (who worked for two years ina hotel room) and a host of other dreamers and doers.

Das' book has only a few flaws. He is utterly unconcerned with environmental issues. Given that global warming has played havoc with both the monsoon and the Himalayan snows-- on which at least one-third of India's economy directly depends-- this omission is surprising. Das ignores the fact that the rewards of post-'93 reforms have left a lot of Indians out in the economic cold, and he seems totally unaware of the world's looming energy crisis (peak oil).

But these are minor quibbles-- this book is a thoughtful and hugely entertaing read.

As a regular reader of Mr. Das' column in the Times of India, I always liked his sense of optimism in spite of his awareness of the problems in India. However, I had mixed feelings about his book - India Unbound. There is a lot of repetition of the same stories in the book. The stories of Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Birla and Tatas are told quite often.

I also don't know what Mr. Das was aiming as his target audience. He always quotes currency in dollars, not Rupees. So I presume he was trying to tell the story of India to someone in the West. If that is the case, a westerner might get confused because of the many contradictions in the book. At times the Author seems to suggest, the India did not have an Industrial revolution. At other places, he commends the Marwaris for creating a great Industrial revolution. There are paragraphs, which seem to suggest, that the British depleted India's wealth. And there are paragraphs, which say that they did not. If the Intended audience was someone in the West, they might also get bored with the stories of Birla, Narayana Murthy et al, because they have their own heroes in business, who have done much better.

In spite of some of these problems, Mr. Das does manage to tell an interesting story about India's Economy. I desperately hope that India will go ahead with the reforms initiated in 1991. This book might be necessary for all our politicians and bureaucrats in India, who are in charge of making policies. Its high time they realized that if a state owned electricity board is continuously making losses, it is the people of India who have to ultimately eat the loss. We pay for the loss through bad roads and bad schools.

Overall, the book is good, no doubt on that. Mr Das has tried to narrate part of the post independence history in a distinctive narration; partly autobiography, partly comprised of views of an industrial insider. That takes it to a 4* rating.

What the book lacks is the cover of the both sides of the post independence saga. Clearly, from economic point of view, there are two episodes in it: the one before economic reforms, and the one after that. This book turned out to be a all bashing gospel of the pre-independence times as well as some of the national leaders of that times. Also, Mr Das seemed to be going gaga over capitalism, which can also be questioned.

Socialist path taken by Nehru can be criticized for various reasons, but that does not necessarily make Nehru a guy of failures. Mr Das spent a lot pages in showering praises for the new age knowledge economy and the respective business leaders, but he must admit this economy has been fueled by the leading national institutions - IITs, IIMs, and others. All these have been setup in socialist times and many of these have been envisioned by Nehru. Instead of giving due credit for this, Mr Das subtly praised the caste system, or more specifically brahminism for the success.

As the nation moves ahead, it will be a matter of time to judge the views expressed by Mr Das, particularly when the 2020 arrives. For those who want to have sneak preview of the Indian entrepreneurial spirit, keep reading it.

Ever wonder how India changed from an impoverished and allegedly over populated third world country to the rising economy that it is today? If so, this is the book for you. India Unbound is a history of post-WWII India with a heavy emphasis on political economy. This is an excellent read for fans of free market capitalism.

This book contains a lot of facts, which further illustrate how genuine pro-capitalist reforms allow a nation (not just a western nation) to flourish. After its independence in 1947, India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru decided to impose a planned economy on India. The elaborate system of licenses, regulations and red tape which ensued was known as the License Raj. India's economy did not really show any upward trends until it underwent market liberalization and provided incentives for direct foreign investment, initially under Prime Minister Rajeev Gandhi in the late 1980s and more comprehensively under Prime Minister Rao in 1991.

However, the true architect of India's economic reform program was Manmohan Singh. Singh is the current Prime Minister of India and was Rao's handpicked finance minister in Rao's Cabinet. He is also has a Ph.D. in economics from Oxford University. Singh's influence is decently documented in India Unbound.

My only complaints about this book are pretty minor. In particular, I think that Gurcharan Das is wrong in his assessment on John Rawls. Das attributes the ideas of Rawls as supportive of market liberalization since Das perceives Rawls as giving moral justification to income inequality (within certain restrictions). Although they might encourage a more liberal economy than India had before the dismantling of the License Raj, the ideas of Rawls, which argue for welfare redistribution in the name of social justice, are hardly a sound basis for capitalism. However, to be clear, Das only mentions Rawls for a few pages.

There has been a change in the thinking of Indians--specially among the young... Since 1947, most of the decades have experienced the influence of Nehru and Gandhi in some form or another. But something strange happened on my last two visits to India at the beginning of the 21st century. Young people were not in awe of the "founding fathers" In fact, many were downright hostile to the memories of Nehru and Gandhi. They argued that were it not for the two political figures, India would be much further along economically. I couldn't put my finger on the ideological shift--until I read India Unbound by Gurcharan Das.

Most young people don't know about what happened after India's Independence from British rule. Nehru preached a "third way" between American capitalism and Soviet communism. Gandhi didn't want the urban elite to forget that India was mostly rural and agrarian. They both sought to balance political freedom and technological progress with the plight of the poor. Gurcharan Das and many of the young argue that there was too much idealism in India's "infancy" and that corrective measures had to be taken.

There are some who argue that it is the very foundation that was laid by devoted thinkers that has allowed India to progress to this point. Gurcharan Das does not feel that way. He argues that true capitalism would have gotten India closer to its objectives much earlier. However, there is too much emphasis on capitalism's capacity to aid growth (ask the East Germans/Polish of former communist states who are unhappy with the transition).

China is the other "developing giant." Now, after years of dizzying growth, China wants to slow down due to pollution, water supply problems, and global warming issues. People don't have the time to read and debate. Family life is going by the wayside. But India Unbound doesn't deal with such issues. Gurcharan Das believes that progress at all costs is good progress. But what happens to family ties or a sense of community? In fact, what is the role of globalization?

Capitalism evolved from a mercantile economy but the mercantile frame of mind gave rise to English colonialism In India. Jeffersonian democratic ideals were supposed to be the basis of American democracy. But, corporations began flexing their muscle. Gurcharan Das doesn't address those issues either. To be fair, India Unbound is a very readable book. Seen from the perspective of the business classes, it makes a lot of sense. However, that isn't a political or social perspective (though the ramifications do extend into those spheres). The reason I think the book should have 5 stars as a rating has to do with the fact that it provokes discussion. We need new thinking everywhere... Read this book, but read other perspectives too.