Politics of unshackling creativity

[31 December 2007 - Economic Times - India] We need a new, holistic vision of reform as something that emancipates, unleashing every individual’s creative potential and nourishing it in a framework that is both global and positively enabling at the same time. In the beginning was the word and the word was Reform. Ever since PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh commenced the dismantling of dirigisme in July 1991, the word has resounded across the length and breadth of the country, in seminar halls as well as at election rallies, eliciting fear and loathing in some quarters and hope and joy in some others, galvanising protest and criticism, on the one hand, and releasing, on the other, productive energies hitherto undetected. ...  We need an integral vision of reform that inspires not just entrepreneurs who set up new factories but also peasants who give up land to build those factories. It’s time politicians stopped pushing reform bit by bit and only as a covert operation. Reform must be hailed as the practical path to emancipation. More