What would have happened in India if that country had liberalized its economy ten years earlier than it did?
Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar does a commendable job supplying a plausible, if gruesome, answer. He
finds that with earlier reform, 14.5 million more children would have survived, 261 million more Indians would have become literate, and 109 million more people would have risen above the poverty line. The delay in economic reform represents an enormous social tragedy. It drives home the point that India’s socialist era, which claimed it would deliver growth with social justice, delivered neither.
