Sudip Bandyopadhyay’s Blog

The global economic crisis has been a huge motivator for the economies across the globe to review their decade old practices and take drastic measures wherever appropriate.

China realised that internal consumption in their  economy needs to be significantly increased and has been trying to boost the same.  Malaysia reversed its thirty year old “Bhumi Putra” policy and allowed Non-Malays to hold majority stake in businesses.  This was unthinkable even few years back and though the overt reason for this reversal in policy may be  gaining of  political mileage, strong economic rationale also supports  this change. The opposition in UK has clearly indicated that  in the very likely event of their return to power in the forthcomingelections the Gordon Brown introduced segregation of financial supervision in  1997  between Bank of England and FSA would be done away with.  All supervisionary powers would be vested with Bank of England while in its new avatar FSA will function as a Consumer Protection agency.  Indonesia, is aggressively trying to eradicate corruption by going after Crony Capitalism.   There is a mood to clean up the stable across the globe.

The fall of the Berlin Wall resulted in a major change in the political landscape of the world.  Similarly, the global economic crisis is ensuring big bang measures in the economic  space, changing the scenario irrevocably.

While India has been relatively better off  being ring fenced from the global turmoil, the lessons from the crisis should stimulate the political and bureaucratic set up to initiate few game changing measures for eradicating economic problems of the country. Agrarian reforms is one such area crying for attention. It has not received the desired reforms for over three decades now. 70% of the population depends on this sector for their livelihood & the inclusive growth badly required for economic prosperity & social harmony requires urgent big bang reforms in this area.