30 years after 1991: What we achieved as an economy, and what was possible

India's record has been good, relative to how other countries have done and compared also to its own previous three decades, but well short of what is required and what was possible, writes T N Ninan

Next week will mark three decades since the P V Narasimha Rao government assumed office and set in motion radical reforms that changed the direction and speed of the Indian economy. In these 30 years, India’s share of the global economy has trebled, from 1.1 per cent to 3.3 per cent. In current US dollars, the economy has multiplied 11 folds; only China and Vietnam have done better. And on the key human development indicators (primarily life expectancy and literacy), India has done marginally better than the average of the countries bracketed in the “medium development” category. From being the