Answer:

In the post liberalization phase, there has been an overarching concern with sustaining high growth rates in the Indian economy. However, while on one hand, the 11thand 12th plan recognised the need of introducing market reforms like- time bound and single window clearance facilities for opening new businesses, labour reforms, providing quality physical infrastructure to the private sector etc. and on the other, it has reinstated the fact that the role of the state needs to take a new avatar where it should become an efficient and transparent regulator to provide a levelled playing field to the players in the market and to reduce the scope of “crony capitalism”.

Moreover, learning from the failure of the trickle down approach in the past two decades, the planning commission and developmental economists like Amartya Sen have argued for pursuing a more socially and economically inclusive growth model. Thus contrary to a reduced role for the state, there is a need to reinvent its role where it morphs itself to become a strong basic service provider in the primary education and health sector thus ensuring that growth becomes more inclusive on one hand (or to ensure that the fruits of growth are distributed more equitably), while becoming a transparent and efficient regulator in sectors that are thrown open to the private sector.

There is an urgent need to eschew any simplistic market vs state debate and recognise the deep complementarities that exist between the two- a strong but redefined role of state would improve India’s standing on the ease of doing business index (India has a dismal ranking of 134 out of 189 countries on the ease of doing business index of World Bank) thus reinforcing the faith of the private sector, while its role as an efficient, basic service provider would ensure that India performs a course correction from becoming a “country which has islands of California in a sea of Sub- Saharan Africa” and this would restore the credibility of both, a market oriented strategy and the practice of democracy in public eye both of which have increasingly come under closer public scrutiny in the recent past.