Economists disagree on reforms miracle

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, immediately disagreed. He also disagreed with Desai’s now-popular view that India is a conglomeration of several different states, created after the partition. ‘‘Nationhood survived India’s partition — we overestimate the British contribution to it,’’ he said.

Disbelievers can scoff, but the last decade’s economic miracles have left the economists agnostic. Some argue, the poverty line is outdated — it must be hiked up by 30 per cent to squeeze in those who grew with the times.

Others present that growth — always stunted because no one ever thought hard enough about the farms — gets more unequal every day. Still others, wiser by distance and learning, gather that the economic miracle is global and visible: It is the detractors and politicians who are perennial doubters. ‘‘Only 1.5 per cent people said they were always hungry in 2002, during India’s worst drought,’’ said Surjit Bhalla, Managing Director, Oxus Research and Investments and author of the talked-about Imagine There’s No Country, which considers the positive and negative fallouts of globalisation.

‘‘I do not want to be over-optimistic — many are still poor. But even if we said that 26 per cent were poor in 1999, today this number is likely to be lower going by NSS data,’’ he argued for the merits of globalisation.

But many felt such claims are fiction. Dr Abhijit Sen, member, Planning Commission said, ‘‘If you divide official GDP figures by official population data, per capita income in agriculture has not increased statistically sufficiently, given that the economy itself has grown at 6 per cent.’’

Arguing that globalisation has, indirectly, much do with agriculturee’s problems, Sen said it sets revenue targets that are met, often enough, by lowering agricultural expenditure.

‘‘Bhalla said India grew well in British times — but even then, growth failed agriculture,’’ Sen drove home.

Dr Y.K. Alagh, Vice-Chairman and emeritus professor, Sardar Patel Institute of Economic and Social Research, said that we have been on the lower GDP path since globalisation became the talk of the town. ‘‘Look at the percentage of workforce dependant on non-agriculture jobs in the eighties and nineties. You would find agri-incomes are not where you want them to be,’’ he said.

All present agreed that the talk of globalisation, like the $10 bn forex reserves, have spread far and wide. They only disagreed on what India can do with both of them. ‘‘It is necessary that we give 15-20 per cent of comfort to those planning large infrastructure projects from the reserves,’’ said Alagh, while Sen warned of a time when the United States decides to control its own deficits. ‘‘Money comes in for profits, and then money goes out… But when the US undertakes fiscal deficit corrections, we’ll finally be forced to look at what we’re ignoring today: environmental costs, long-term decline in population growth rate and lack of education,’’ he said.