economics Posts

“The Nehru-Era Economic History and Thought & Their Lasting Impact” by Arvind Panagariya

21 06 , 2025 No Comments

India’s economic model underwent transformational change following independence in 1947. The country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, embarked upon two foundational projects to build modern India: a political project aimed at establishing democracy with universal suffrage, and an economic one aimed at ending poverty. Three-quarters of a century later, his political project is a resounding success, but the opposite is true of the economic one as per the author.

The Nehru-Era Economic History and Thought & Their Lasting Impact examines the evolution of Nehru’s economic philosophy with socialism, self-sufficiency, and heavy-industry development at its core. Through extensive archival research, Arvind Panagariya reconstructs and reinterprets this history, paying particular attention to the administrative processes deployed to implement policies, contemporary economic thought, and important historical events not adequately covered in the existing literature. He assesses the evolution of Nehru’s own political beliefs and the construction of the Nehru development model, the resulting regime and exclusionary nature of economic growth, and the lasting intellectual legacy of the Nehru-era socialism on politicians, civil servants, policy analysts, and businesspeople in the six decades since Nehru’s death.

This book is the fascinating tale of a model with the near-unanimous approval of experts from all around the world at its inception and the impact of its failure.

Read an excerpt from the book on Moneycontrol.

The book has been published by Oxford University Press India.

Arvind Panagariya is a Professor of Economics in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He was the first Vice Chairman of the NITI Aayog, Government of India, in the rank of a cabinet minister. He has authored more than 20 books, published professional articles in all the top Economics journals, and written for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and the WSJ. In 2012, the Government of India awarded him with Padma Bhushan, its third highest honor in any field.

21 June 2025

Books on advice for women

16 08 , 2017 No Comments

Three books of advice for women spread across more than a century is a great way of mapping the enormous strides women have made over the decades. Don’ts for Wives by Blanche Ebbutt ( 1913) is a list of instructions to women advising them on how to survive, particularly on how to manage their husbands. Tucked away in it are some gems like this:

Don’t forget that you have a right to some money to spend as you like; you earn it as wife, and mother, and housekeeper. Very likely you will spend it on the house or the children when you get it; but that doesn’t matter — it is yours to spend as you like. 

Published in 2017 are Little Black Book by Otegha Uwagba ( HarperCollins)  and The Whole Shebang: Sticky Bits of Being a Woman  by Lalita Iyer ( Bloomsbury India) are two handybooks on what it takes to be a professional woman while juggling a million other responsibilities. There is plenty of sound advice offered by Otegha Uwagba whereas Lalita Iyer imparts similar nuggets of information but in a more personal way through anecdotes. There are many, many more books of a similar nature being published and of late there is practically a deluge of these books since the women reader market is burgeoning. Suddenly from a niche area it has become a mainstream market so there is a range of information available. All said and done all the books advise that women need to focus on self-preservation, maintaining their sanity, identity and self-respect and not necessarily capitulating to all that is expected of them. Sharing stories is one way of being able to get through to other women.

16 August 2017 

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