The Economist rightly remarked in January 1987 that socialism as practised in India has been a fraud. Our brand of socialism did not result in transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor but only from the honest rich to the dishonest rich.

We built up State-Owned Enterprises — called the public sector in India. The sleeping sickness of socialism is now universally acknowledged, — but not officially in India. No less than 231 public sector enterprises are run by the Union Government, and 636 by the State Governments. These have been the black holes of our economy. There is a tidal wave of privatization sweeping across the world from Bangladesh to Brazil, but it has turned aside in its course and passed India by.

The most persistent tendency in India has been to have too much government and too little administration; too many laws and too little justice; too many public servants and too little public service; too many controls and too little welfare. From the very first decade of the republic the steel claws of the permit-licence-quota raj were laid upon the national economy, and even today their grip continues with insignificant relaxation.

Today the situation remains unchanged, – only the number of files has increased a thousandfold. Millions of manhours are wasted every day in coping with inane bureaucratic regulations and a torrential spate of amendments.

Legal redress is so time-consuming enough to make infinity intelligible. A lawsuit once started in India is the nearest thing to eternal life ever seen on this earth. Close to two million cases are pending in the eighteen High Courts alone, and more than 2,10,000 cases in the Supreme Court for admission or final hearing or miscellaneous relief.

India has 15 per cent of the world’s population, but only 1.5 per cent of the world’s income. In the four decades since we became a republic, our per capita income in real terms did not even double but increased by only 91 per cent. Today we are still the twenty-first poorest nation on earth.

Perceptive observers in foreign countries where Indians work and prosper are baffled by one question — how does India, with its great human potential and natural resources, manage to remain poor? The answer is that we are not poor by nature but poor by policy. You would not be far wrong if you called India the world’s leading expert in the art of perpetuating poverty.

Most of our politicians and bureaucrats, untainted by knowledge of development in the outside world, have no desire to search for genes of ideas which deserve to be called “a high-yielding variety of economics.” We are smugly reconciled to low yield from high ideals.

India is rattling — and rattling violently — with spare human capacity. More than 30 million are registered on our 840 Employment Exchanges. According to objective estimates, there must be at least 20 million other unemployed who are not registered.

In 1950, India ranked sixteenth in the list of exporting countries of the world; today it ranks forty-third. Using another yardstick, in 1950 India had 2.2 per cent of the world export market; today its share stands reduced to 0.45 per cent.

https://theprint.in/opinion/indian-liberals-matter/like-a-gambler-govts-squandered-indias-legacy-through-mindless-socialism-nani-palkhivala/2722087/