A few days ago, the affable Swedish ambassador to India, Lars Olof Lindgren, recounted a strange story. Sweden was one of the leaders in nuclear technology till the 1970s, till the environment brigade struck. The country then decided to wear down its nuclear-fuel based power plants and build no more. This year, as Sweden sent its industrial sherpas to invite India to invest in the country, one of the things, he said, they could now learn from India was the know-how for the nuclear technology they had abandoned.

India’s industrial adventure and often misadventure are

often littered with several tales of misses too, but listening to the ambassador, I realised none were as dramatic as this one. One possible reason for this is the fact that the scale of our

industrial units was too puny till about the year 2000 to make a significant difference in terms of opportunity lost or gained. That picture does not hold true any more. In the second half of 2009, the big question coming up for every regulator is the cost of foregoing an opportunity.

Or the benefits of getting it right, as in the case of expansion of bank branches in India. On Tuesday, as part of its credit policy, the Reserve Bank of India relaxed the license requirement for banks to set up branches in Tier 3 to Tier 6 level towns (basically villages). The step acknowledges how big the opportunity has become to tap the changing economic profile of the Indian small towns and villages. But the story would not have reached this point so soon, if in 2007 the RBI had not allowed banks to step outside brick and mortar branches, permitting their agents to reach target populations to offer savings and loan facilities — using the telecom backbone to stay in touch with their branch. Of course, it promptly made a mess of it by

... contd.