Although the 20 papers divided into five heads (growth and economic reforms; poverty, inequality and economic reforms; macroeconomics; transforming India; and the government) may have been originally triggered by columns written for a business paper, these are proper academic and rigorous papers. Therefore, I cannot think of a single volume that is even remotely a substitute for this one. Panagariya’s introduction mentions Bhagwati and Padma Desai’s 1970

Planning for Industrialisation, Bhagwati and Srinivasan’s 1975 Foreign Trade Regimes, and Vijay Joshi and I.M.D. Little’s 1994 Macroeconomics and the Political Economy. Bhagwati and Srinivasan and Joshi and Little weren’t the same. I think Panagariya has written a 2008 version of Bhagwati and Desai. That’s a book that needed to be written, by someone with sufficient knowledge and perseverance.
The first head of growth and economic reforms divides India’s transition into four stages — the takeoff under a liberal regime (1961-65), socialism striking with a vengeance (1965-81), liberalisation by stealth (1981-88) and the triumph of liberalisation (1988-2006). “The reform process picked up in a major way once again under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, especially after the 1999 elections returned his National Democratic Alliance (NDA) with a clear parliamentary majority…. But the resolve within the UPA to move the reforms forward has also been at best weak.… Once the UPA publicly embraced the view that the reforms had not helped the poor, its ability to push the same reforms was greatly undercut.” Panagariya is unabashedly pro-reform and as the discussion under the head of poverty, inequality and economic reforms makes clear, the case is also that reforms are good for poverty alleviation.

... contd.