Week end reading

The more and more I read articles like this I feel that I should reread the beautiful book The Law by Bastiat.

"One little-known aspect of Shastri is that he could have become India’s first economic reformer."

• Shastri saw that clearly when he took charge of the country after Nehru. Nayar says Shastri was never a big votary of planning. P.N. Dhar, one of the best policy minds of his generation and later a close adviser to Indira Gandhi, pointed out in Indira Gandhi, the ‘Emergency’ And Indian Democracy, his memoir: “Lal Bahadur Shastri, the unassuming prime minister who had succeeded the charismatic Nehru, seemed an unlikely person to face up to the (economic) situation. But in his own quiet way he did initiate a series of steps which would have not only brought the economy out of the existing crisis but possibly put it on a high-growth path in the long run. He wore no ideological blinkers; he saw facts as they were in all their starkness. Chronic food shortages made him shift investment from basic industries to agriculture. Roaring black markets persuaded him to make a relative shift from controls to incentives, and the glaring inefficiency of the public sector made him accept a larger role for the private sector and foreign investment. He also took measures to shift the locus of economic decision-making from the Planning Commission to the ministries and from the Centre to the states. These measures reduced the influence of the Planning Commission—which had developed a rigid, almost doctrinaire outlook on economic policies—and at the same time decentralized decision-making.”