India's privatisation in monochrome

When Adam Smith wrote his magnum opus in the latter half of the 18th century, he understood that a book on economics would not invigorate reader's interests. So, to make an exceedingly dull subject accessible to the general reader, he relied extensively on history to explain his views on the economy, making The Wealth of Nations a timeless classic for economics students and lay readers. David Ricardo relied on Robinson Crusoe, and Karl Marx moved a step ahead by marrying economy with literature, arts, history and alchemy. 

The first volume of Das Kapital is a perfect amalgamation of fields to explain the workings of society. Over time, however, academic papers have become more monochromatic in nature. 

An economics paper rarely deals with history, let alone other fields such as literature or contemporary arts. Books on economics are written primarily for economists and not for scholars from different areas. The approach may have its advantages, but it has undoubtedly excluded a large proportion of the population from the study of ideas.

Privatisation in India: Journey and Challenges follows a similar trajectory of contemporary economic literature with some distinctions. The succinct work is divided into 12 chapters, not more than a dozen pages each, detailing the history of privatisation and liberalisation in India, detailing the reforms under successive governments. 

The author, Sudhir Naib, a former professor and government functionary, starts with the distinction between privatisation and disinvestment. In subsequent chapters, he explains the landscape of public sector enterprises in the country. He alludes to economic concepts, such as externalities, to explain the role of public sector enterprises and their shortcomings within the Indian context. 

The book presents a detailed chronological timeline of privatisation in the country. It details each era’s hits and misses, keeping the politics at bay and focusing on a bird’s eye view of the economy. The author doesn’t praise or criticise policies too much – a quality that is common to books written by former government functionaries. That said, the book does fulfil its purpose in detailing the concepts and history of privatisation accurately and is helpful for that purpose.

But a book-length chronology of India’s privatisation journey cannot be considered a satisfactory substitute for in-depth analysis on the subject. In that sense, the book could be classified as one of those monochromatic works that focuses only on one aspect and will only be of interest to certain specific sections of society. It will certainly find a place for itself in libraries and study centres as a handy reference for economics students looking for an accurate chronological view of privatisation and privatisation attempts in the country.

The other shortcoming is the context within which the chapters are presented. Given the author's expertise, one would have expected a focus on a particular decade of privatisation and offer a detailed examination of that exercise. Instead, the book whizzes past economic developments to take in more decades. Global scenarios during the time also find selected mention in the book, enhancing the impression that it is a study conducted in a vacuum. There is an over-reliance on newspaper articles and columns to drive home different points of view on the topic. 

This has the effect of turning the work into a long review of the literature and policy on privatisation and the opinions on it.

One good thing, though, is the fact that the book is replete with data, and the tabular representations, wherever available, do justice to the chronology. A greater stress on graphics would have certainly lent more credence, but the availability of data in paragraphs in some way makes up for that. Then again, the concise nature of the work prevents the author from making a detailed comparison. 

If you have been following newspaper articles and columns over time, then the book offers nothing new in terms of information. For many, though, it presents a timeline of events and issues on privatisation within the academic realm. 

A Google search may also lead you to such a presentation of work on privatisation, but the curation will be time-consuming. Here, the author has taken the task of curation upon himself. 

It was probably written with a specific audience in mind, but does that audience require a quick analysis of such an intricate and complex issue? This is something academic authors will have to juggle as they write more on such topics.