In this episode of Growth is Good, Rahul speaks with Montek Singh Ahluwalia, former Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission and a central figure in India’s reform journey.
They discuss how reforms were debated and designed inside government, why some changes stuck while others stalled, and what it takes to build political coalitions around growth. Montek reflects on lessons from the 1991 reforms, the “MD Note” that leaked into public debate, the role of leaders like Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh, and why continuity across governments mattered.
The conversation also looks ahead: how India can reach 8% growth, the challenges of climate change and technology disruption, and why states must lead the next wave of reforms.
A rare insider’s view on three decades of reform — and what India must do to deliver on the promise of Viksit Bharat.
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In this episode of Growth is Good, Arvind Panagariya returns to unpack his latest book, The Nehru Development Model—a sweeping intellectual and historical account of how India embraced socialism post-independence and why it stayed stuck there for decades.We dive deep into how Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of industrialization, planning, and self-sufficiency created a sprawling license-permit Raj, why Indian intellectuals, bureaucrats, and businesses bought into the model, and how Narasimha Rao (not just 1991) ultimately broke the mould.What we cover:How Nehru built his unique brand of socialismThe heavy-industry obsession and its lasting costsWhy reforms failed under Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai, and Rajiv GandhiHow Narasimha Rao became India’s Deng XiaopingWhy the legacy of the “Nehru Model” still lingers in bureaucracy, business, and the academyThis is a must-watch for anyone curious about India’s economic journey—why it stalled for decades, how it finally turned a corner, and what it takes to keep reform momentum alive.
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What drives India’s biggest reforms? How did campaigns like Incredible India and Startup India come to life? And what really goes on inside the engine room of government?When we talk about economic reform in India, we often think of big slogans or bureaucratic hurdles. But few people have actually been inside the engine room of reform quite like Amitabh Kant. From his early days as a district collector to spearheading campaigns like God’s Own Country and Incredible India, and later shaping national programs like Startup India, Ease of Doing Business, and the G20 presidency—he has been a central figure in India’s transition from a control-driven state to an enabling one.In this wide-ranging conversation, he reflects on what it really took to brand India on the global stage, how punishment postings turned into platforms for innovation, and why enterprise—not just policy—is central to national progress. He shares candid views on privatization, public sector reform, and how India’s bureaucracy can evolve to match the ambition of its people. As he closes out a storied public career, this episode is both a retrospective and a forward-looking blueprint from someone who’s helped shape the India we see today.If you're interested in economic development, public policy, branding India globally, or just want to understand how India is positioning itself on the world stage, this conversation is for you.🔔 Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell icon to stay updated with future episodes of Growth is Good.#AmitabhKant #G20India #IncredibleIndia #StartupIndia #EaseOfDoingBusiness #IndianEconomy #NITIAayog #GrowthIsGoodPodcast
When we talk about infrastructure in India, it’s usually in the context of potholes, delayed metro lines, or power outages. But our guest this week, Vinayak Chatterjee, brings a far deeper and more nuanced lens to the discussion. Vinayak walks us through the sector’s remarkable journey—from the crumbling systems of the 1990s to a present where power shortages are rare, road connectivity has transformed, and ports and airports have matured into global gateways. In this wide-ranging conversation, Vinayak shares sharp insights on what infrastructure development has gotten right, where the private sector came in (and fell out), and how public-private partnerships rose and declined. He discusses why infrastructure must now be seen not as a bottleneck but as a backbone—and why the next era will demand a new imagination that centres people, not just projects. It’s a candid account from someone who has observed the policy shifts and project rollouts up close for nearly three decades.
Our popular discourse is obsessed with what should or should not be taught in schools. This mostly relates to history-medieval, and even ancient Indian history. Our guest for this episode has her own lament in this regard, though the history she's talking about is a lot more modern, hence relevant to our present challenges and opportunities. Shruti Rajagopalan, Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, thinks modern India's economic history needs to have a chapter of its own, in schools and universities, so the next generation gets a real sense of what life was like under socialism, and how an extreme shortage economy held us back for over 40 years after independence, until liberalisation in the '90s allowed India to dream beyond a Bajaj scooter.
Shruti shares several insightful anecdotes, all underlining that liberalisation hasn't been taught or understood as much as it needs to. It's perhaps the hush-hush nature of the exercise which meant that we never fully followed through on market reforms that could have rescued Indian manufacturing from the stagnation it's witnessing today. In this hour-long conversation with FED Director Rahul Ahluwalia, Shruti shares her prescription on what's needed to repeat that pivotal moment in our history. "It's a bit like how Ernest Hemingway described going bankrupt. Gradually, then suddenly." It will be largely down to well-meaning folks in policy, academia and civil society, who must keep the iron hot, which means we must continuously advocate for economic reforms, so that when the political window opens, the deregulation sentiment can be written into law.
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We’ve talked a lot in this podcast about what plagues India’s businesses. ‘Regulatory cholesterol’ is a term that comes up repeatedly. Our guest for this episode is a corporate lawyer who has helped his clients navigate the minefield that is entrepreneurship. Akshay Jaitly, Founding Partner at Trilegal, started out thinking about growth from the Nehruvian lens of redistribution, which was the founding paradigm for our regulatory regime that treats any entrepreneur as a soon-to-be crook. However, his years of experience as a practicing corporate lawyer exposed him to the day-to-day difficulties faced by his clients in trying to navigate through the ‘regulatory cholesterol’. If private investment is going to be the engine of growth, then we can’t have a regulatory regime that is biased towards businesses that succeed or fail based on their ability to manipulate their way through our regulatory systems. We must foster a climate of entrepreneurship that encourages value adding businesses to scale up.
To that end, Akshay shares a whole range of ideas, from the philosophical root causes of our malaise, to decriminalisation, replacing the empty threat of imprisonment with more actionable penalties, to using data for reform. At the core of it all is the fundamental belief that people must be trusted, hence their transactions, with the state and each other, must be smoothened. He also covers the incredible strains on India’s energy sector, and ways to rescue us from the precipice we find ourselves teetering over.
Every episode of Growth Is Good has delved into why we must reform India’s economic policies to unlock our manufacturing potential. Labour remains a critical aspect where reforms are needed, often attempted, but found difficult to implement. The politicised nature of the question has given birth to narratives that contrast worker wellbeing with industrial growth, as if both cannot coexist. India’s socialist imagination, which looks at big businesses with suspicion, doesn’t help the cause either. Given this state of affairs, it was refreshing to speak with Virjesh Upadhyay, a lifelong trade unionist who’s served as the General Secretary of the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, one of India’s largest trade unions. We were in agreement on many questions. Most of all, it was refreshing to hear that the labour movement wholeheartedly supports industrial growth.
The question that remains then is how do we strike common ground on issues that still divide us and which have in the past driven a wedge so deep as to put important policy reforms in cold storage for decades. Here, Virjesh shared several anecdotes that underlined the importance of building relationships and cultivating an environment of trust amongst all stakeholders. The core belief that should drive all of our efforts? Our paths may differ, but we’re all striving for the same goal: Greater prosperity for all Indians.
Episode Chapters
(00:00) Episode Highlights
(02:36) Virjesh Upadhay on witnessing economic growth
(11:55) Making society a stakeholder in growth: lessons from '91
(16:02) Farm laws and where we went wrong
(21:13) Narrative building for implementing reforms
(28:28) Are India's tough labour laws holding back industrial growth?
(36:32) Building relationships for effecting policy reforms
(37:52) How dialogue helped breach Industry-Trade Union stalemate at Maruti
(46:14) Should government mandate minimum wages, overtime pay?
(48:40) The 90-hour workweek and pay disparity in industry
(49:38) Ethical business practices
(57:23) Virjesh Upadhyay's perspective on labour movement in India
Our guest for this episode is an employer who went beyond merely railing about the excessive compliances that Indian businesses must put up with. Manish Sabharwal, Vice-Chairman at TeamLease RegTech, remembers the number by heart – 26,134 – the number of different reasons an Indian employer can be put in jail. So do so many people from the industry, academia, and the government. ‘Jailed for Doing Business’, a 2022 report by TeamLease and the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), was the kind of seminal document that brought home the exact scale of India’s regulatory cholesterol, which inhibits innovation and entrepreneurship at every stage of a business’s life cycle.
In this hour-long conversation with FED Director Rahul Ahluwalia, Sabharwal admits that his earlier attempts at influencing policy outcomes for the Indian industry were overly philosophical. “But reform only happens when you make your ask specific, finite and actionable,” he says in this episode. Sabharwal has many actionable asks. They all circle back to shedding our regulatory weight, cutting down on bureaucratic excesses, and turning India into a lean and mean administrative machine that empowers businesses instead of limiting them.
“The job of the government is not to set things on fire. It is to create the conditions for spontaneous combustion.”
Episode chapters -
(00:00) - Terrorism & jobs: growing up in Kashmir
(12:20) - India's persistent 'regulatory cholesterol'
(23:15) - Is it becoming more difficult to advocate for economic growth?
(30:40) - India's inefficient welfare state
(43:30) - Politics vs economics
(51:10) - GDP growth for geopolitics and defence
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Our guest for this episode, Tarun Bajaj, first stepped onto the field as an IAS Officer in 1988, just as India was about to shed its socialist baggage. While the country navigated the shift from scarcity to relative abundance, he had a ringside view (and several performing roles) of how the bureaucracy and political executive went from resisting to accepting the idea of the government giving up control of the economy.
By the time he retired in 2022, he had also served in the PMO, and then as Economic Affairs Secretary and later as the Revenue Secretary to the Government of India. He played a key role in shaping the Indian government's economic response to the Covid-19 pandemic and was also instrumental in stabilising the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime.
In this conversation with FED Director Rahul Ahluwalia, Bajaj shares several anecdotes and insights, including some from when he worked closely with the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi.
Do watch the full video and follow to be notified about our upcoming episodes.
Episode Chapters: (02:33) - First brush with economic growth and its importance
(06:20) - India's controlled economy pre-liberalisation (1991)
(11:30) - Will India forget the lessons from the 'license raj'?
(13:38) - India's changing stance on wealth creation
(16:00) - Growth as a nation through the prism of cricket
(17:00) - Market reforms enabling progress
(19:30) - Geopolitics favouring India
(23:20) - Ease of doing business for SMEs
(25:00) - What's hindering reforms?
(29:25) - How can we move the needle on the ground?
(35:00) - How to convince politicians about reforms?
(36:20) - When Govt understood need for public capital expenditure
(38:30) - When the PM endorsed wealth creation
(41:50) - Working in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO)
(47:30) - What has constrained privatisation?
(51:00) - Money is stuck; pending judicial reforms
(54:00) - How lobbies oppose reforms
(56:00) - Secret behind Gurugram
(1:02:00) - India's economic response to Covid-19
Our guest for this episode of FED Dialogues is one of the strongest proponents of countries striving for GDP growth as a means of improving human lives at scale. American economist Lant Pritchett's arguments for growing the size of the pie are incisive and empirically driven, based on his work at the World Bank. He's done a lot of work in keeping alive the attention on the importance of growth by adding to the scholarship on how it is the strongest determinant for human development outcomes such as reducing child mortality or enhancing the standard of living of oppressed communities such as Dalits in India.
He also has a lot to say about 'income inequality', stuff that he admits may get him in trouble, but he says it anyway. So we hear his take on why the West may 'want' to believe that people in the Global South don't care about economic growth as much as they do about equity, and why fear-mongering about the 'rich getting richer' may actually be quite misleading when viewed in context of the immense benefits that economic growth brings for everyone, including those at the bottom of the pyramid!
Watch the full video.
Episode Chapters
(00:00) Episode Highlights
(03:13) Lant's personal connect to economic growth
(04:55) GDP as a determinant of human development
(09:30) Growth and income inequality
(10:25) Are the poor really getting poorer?
(21:35) Do poor countries care more for equity than growth?
(34:15) Enabling economic growth vs targeted charity work
(36:46) Sustained economic growth - incredibly rare and easily reversed
(39:52) "Only 13 countries..."
(50:26) Why exports matter
(53:56) On exports, India is different than most other countries
(56:51) When should government listen to the industry?
(1:00:00) Exporters are 'magicians'
(1:12:30) Migration for economic growth
Show notes
(05:18) - Paper on importance of GDP for reducing child mortality https://documents1.worldbank.org/cura...
(11:36) Chile's growth incidence curve https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/po...
(13:25) Dalits in Uttar Pradesh in the market reform era https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/sites/defa...
(14:12) Factfulness by Hans Rosling https://www.amazon.in/dp/1473637465?r...
(22:03) Graph by Visual Capitalist titled "What If Everyone Lived Like These Countries?" https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-...
(22:58) Malthusian curve: Population grows exponentially and food resources linearly https://www.researchgate.net/figure/M...
(27:38) Envelopment graphs https://lantpritchett.org/economic-gr...
(30:20) "Growth is not enough" https://www.project-syndicate.org/onp...
(34:20) Development work vs charity work https://lantpritchett.org/development...
(40:05) Success stories of sustained high growth https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/s...
(1:00:00) Types of market participants framework - rentiers, powerbrokers, workhorses and magicians https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...
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Ajay Shah, economist extraordinaire and author of the finest primer on public policy in India - 'In Service of the Republic' - believes everything is everything! It's more than just the 'catchy' name of his insightful podcast with Amit Varma. Ajay explained when he joined us for our own humble endeavour - FED Dialogues - that while the phrase is borrowed from Bruce Springsteen, it speaks to a deeper philosophy held by Ajay and Amit. "The whole world adds up to something together. We wanted to give a flavour of that interconnectedness about the world".
His conversation with FED Director Rahul Ahluwalia was a lot like that — everything! They touched on a myriad of topics, from looking at the private sector's flagging appetite for investment to categorising industrial policy into four pillars (and why he's unenthusiastic about all four) to what we can learn and what we must not learn from the China and Japan growth stories.
Watch the full video.
Video Chapters
(00:00) - Episode Highlights
(02:20) - Ajay's personal connect with economic growth
(05:10) - What is wrong with India's growth story?
(07:50) - Too much central planning and private investment
(10:20) - Four pillars of industrial policy
(15:03) - Government placing bets with public money
(18:37) - "I just want to question the arrogance..."
(20:27) - Ethno-nationalism
(21:20) - Indian firms vs global firms
(30:04) - On Production-linked Incentives (PLI)
(39:03) - Competition with China
(43:33) - China's macroeconomic collapse
(44:00) - Rise of Xi Jinping
(59:00) - Story of Japan's growth and perils of industrial policy
(1:07:00) - South Korea's unique growth story
(1:10:00) - Why exports matter!
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Video Editor: Aditya Varier
Our guest for this episode of FED Dialogues, a private equity investor turned philanthropist, has a neat analogy for how he looks at philanthropy. He's done the ‘debt’ part of his philanthropy - set up a world-class university where he can see the impact he's creating. He's now looking at more ‘equity’ opportunities in philanthropy. These are causes where the likelihood of success is lower, and attribution for the success, if it happens, is impossible; but where the potential ‘return’ on investments can be massive in terms of positive impact.
Ashish Dhawan is the Founder-CEO of The Convergence Foundation (TCF), whose portfolio consists of 13 mission-driven organisations, including FED, that work at the system level to move the needle on complex issues and create impact at scale. Ashish likens this high-risk philanthropy to "not playing defence, but going for the big hit. When it comes to philanthropy, my philosophy is equity 100%. Because I know, when I look at the chart over 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, 100 years, you've outperformed by a mile."
Watch the full video.
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Our guest for this episode has just authored one of the most highly acclaimed books on India - “Accelerating India’s Development: A State-Led Roadmap For Effective Governance”. In this fascinating one hour conversation, Karthik gives us an introduction to the key messages of his book - the idea that the government can do more by improving the quality of its spending, or the 'pipes of public service delivery' as he calls it, instead of focusing on the share of budget spent on key sectors, and by removing the frictions that plague Indian industry and hamper productivity, rather than offering all kinds of subsidies and incentives to a few marquee investors.
He also airs his worry that the book may give the impression that he’s a statist since most chapters talk about enhancing state capacity to accelerate growth. However, in this conversation with Rahul Ahluwalia, founder-director at the Foundation for Economic Development (FED), Muralidharan explains that “by focusing on what I want the government to do, I'm sending a strong implicit message to what it should not do.”
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Growing up in a business household, Naushad Forbes read and heard about the gulf in living standards that separated countries in the league of South Korea, from India. That gulf, which was non-existent at one point in time - India's per capita GDP was the same as South Korea's in 1960 and slightly higher than China's in 1990 - has since widened substantially, to the extent that today, China's per capita income is six times that of India's, while South Korea's is 16 times more. Naushad explains what he believes it will take to catch-up in this hour-long conversation with Rahul Ahluwalia, founding director at Foundation for Economic Development (FED).
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From classrooms to political rallies to multilateral summits, entrepreneurship is the buzzword being peppered liberally everywhere, and for good reason. It’s the fulcrum of innovation, employment and wealth creation. And nothing breeds success like success! It takes a few to succeed, for a thousand more to strive for success. So, the flywheel keeps spinning. But are we correctly defining entrepreneurship – the kind that will be one of the solutions to India’s unemployment puzzle? It’s not narrow, i.e. restricted to tech startups with an office in Bengaluru looking to be the next unicorn. It’s also not entrepreneurship by compulsion, like the street vendor with a degree who’d much rather have a good job.
We want entrepreneurship by conviction; to have that, we must remove the compliance burden that prevents our micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) from becoming bigger. FED’s analysis reveals that of the 6.5 crore MSMEs in India, only 60,000 engage in meaningful exports. Much of it is because of a deficient ecosystem – only 15% of Indian MSMEs can access formal credit. Our guest for this episode argues that a lot of it is also attributable to the absence of a growth mindset and complacency.
In this episode of FED Dialogues, Piyush Doshi, Operating Partner at Foundation for Economic Development, sat down with Ravi Venkatesan, who quit a successful corporate career at Microsoft and founded Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME). From working with local businesses in Ludhiana to help them identify a growth event to pursue, to seeding the idea of entrepreneurship in young minds through the school curriculum, Ravi shares profound insights about what it takes to encourage an entrepreneurial drive in an entire nation. What keeps him going? “It’s a country with mouth-watering opportunities and eye-watering challenges.”
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It’s been over 30 years since India liberalised its economy. If it didn’t sink in then, it’s crystal clear today that 1991 was an epochal moment for modern India, the country we were and what we aspire to become.
Our guest for this episode of FED Dialogues, acclaimed author and former Chief Executive of Procter & Gamble India, Gurcharan Das, goes so far as to call it our real economic Azadi or independence. A devout socialist in his formative years, something changed in Das, prompting him to take up the study, and eventually become a strident champion of liberal economic thought. His conviction in the power of the invisible hand of free markets grew stronger as he unwittingly breached the law to sell Vicks VapoRub to millions during an epidemic, and steered his company through a time of great restrictions on doing business in India, the infamous ‘License Raj’.
In this conversation with FED’s Founding Director Rahul Ahluwalia, Das shares profound anecdotes that will shape your perspective on India’s economic growth trajectory, quotes Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping on selling economic reforms and ditching the planned economy model, and tells us why India, in the 21st century, should strive for an industrial revolution.
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India is stepping up its ambitions of gaining global market share in labour-intensive manufacturing. The success we have seen in electronics and smartphone assembly with the production-linked incentive or PLI scheme suggests that electronics manufacturing services or EMS can be the perfect launchpad for achieving our goal of seeing the share of manufacturing increase from the present 13% to 25% of India’s GDP. To explore this opportunity, Vinay Ramesh, COO at the Foundation for Economic Development, sat down with Banmali Agrawala, Chairman at Tata Electronics. Agrawala has been a champion for the EMS opportunity in India and shares intriguing insights about why this moment in India’s growth trajectory is particularly special from a manufacturing standpoint.
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Evidence tells us, unequivocally, that sustained economic growth is the best bet for poverty alleviation. But scepticism about growth remains embedded in our discourse. In this conversation with one of India’s most-renowned economists, first Vice-Chair of the NITI Aayog and Chair of the 16th Finance Commission, Dr. Arvind Panagariya and FED Director Rahul Ahluwalia talk about his personal journey and perspectives on growth that still shape India’s intellectual discourse and policymaking.
