“India must touch a 10 per cent growth rate and sustain it for 10, 20 and 30 years” to make poverty part of India’s history. “India has no choice but to grow at a rapid rate,” Chidambaram said.

He insisted that economic “growth is not an end in itself”. It was merely “the means to achieve the objectives we desire”. It is about a strategy to “raise resources and acquire the capacity to spend more money on the provision of goods and services that will mitigate the hardship of millions of poor people and bring some cheer in their lives,” he added.

He underlined his “hope and wish” that one of his successors will come to Singapore in the not too distant future and declare that India has eliminated poverty, for so long the principal international signifier of India.

Chidambaram’s book is a collection of the columns he wrote for The Indian Express in the two years before he became India’s Finance Minister for the second time in 2004.

Shekhar Gupta, Editor-in-Chief of The Indian Express, referred to the newspaper’s loss of many of its columnists, including Chidambaram, for the UPA Government in 2004. He suggested the same might happen if the NDA returns to power in the next general elections.

Talking about the role of The Indian Express as the broad church of Indian journalism, Gupta pointed to the fact that the paper was about to publish a long critique of Chidambaram’s latest budget by senior BJP leader and former Union Minister Arun Shourie.

... contd.