The debate on capitalism and its critics got a new life with the Asian meltdown and now the anniversary of Lehman Bros.

It does not take place in the capitalist countries where the issues as the pressure of the meltdown started really hurting on jobs and output, was the optimal role of the State and of strategic policies.

But in developing countries the argumentation is severe. It is a very Rashomon context with partial mind sets holding forth as the final growth enlightenment. India has consequences for the market of ideas elsewhere and in the global bazaar there is money in books and teaching policy.

The core argument is simple.

India was a socialist country under Indira Gandhi and suffered, with a Hindu growth rate. Poverty increased in absolute numbers, agriculture was neglected (the negative aggregate measure of support-AMS- argument) and social indicators suffered. Rajiv Gandhi was well intentioned but did not have a policy vision and engineered both unstable and unsustainable growth.

Then came the 91 Brettonwoods reform in the Narasimha Government and growth went up, poverty levels went down and the economy is on solid foundations, since. A blip or two are irrelevant. The facts are not so. India achieved food self reliance in the Seventies and Jeffrey Sachs recommends the India planning policy then for Sahelian Africa today, forgetting that these things don't happen without political will and expertise and the negative AMS was incorrectly propagated even by its Washington based authors, as they now admit. India has been growing fast since the mid-Seventies, most certainly since the Eighties.

... contd.