By Sourabh Gupta

July 10, 2015

"India's domestic and international economic choices have not always been the wisest.

At independence, India was determined to transcend the distorted pattern of economic integration with the world that two centuries of exploitative colonialism had engendered. But in the process, it ended up effectively locking itself out of global trade and investment flows altogether—just at the time when advanced countries were tearing down their mercantilist tariff walls to make way for the liberal, post-war trading order.

Central planners in New Delhi foisted an import substitution industrialization model of development, one suited to middle-income, primary-product exporters, upon an impoverished agrarian society. In doing so they condemned all but a privileged pocket of urban and public sector employees to the margins of the modern economy."

Read more:
http://thediplomat.com/2015/07/indias-new-opportunity-to-lead-south-asia/

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