It has been more than twenty years since the unlikely combination of PV Narasimha Rao as Prime Minister and his Oxford-educated Finance Minister finally liberated (so they claim) the Indian economy from overwhelming government control. It was a rotten edifice based on institutionalized scarcity, wildly illogical price controls, hilariously shoddy products, protectionism and endemic underperformance that was quickly demolished in 100 days of inspired action. The socialist utopia fueled by the feverish imagination of Nehru and Mahalanobis, which seemed destined to rot forever at the so-called “Hindu growth rate”, was now dead and buried, just like them. In the iconic Union Budget of 1991, Singh introduced the New Economic Policy or NEP, which reversed decades and decades of inefficient policies. Some features of this policy included the abolition of industrial licensing, elimination of industries' reserves from the public sector, removal of threshold limit on assets and, most interestingly, automatic approval for foreign investment up to 51% in specific high priority sectors. Stabilization was also a priority, with new measures such as the abolition of export subsidies and the restructuring of fertilizer subsidies, reducing the crippling fiscal deficit from 8.4% in 1991 to a slightly more manageable 5.7% in 1993. What were the effects of these reforms on daily life? ? In fact there were many. Average real incomes have quadrupled (Rajadhyaksha, Open Sesame, 2011), with concomitant increases in living standards. Consumer spending picked up and it became easier for individuals to get loans from banks. Banks, in turn, began offering better interest rates and programs for auto, home, and personal loans. Accordingly, consumer ownership shifts... middle of paper... over a given period of time through the extent to which the distribution of income or consumption expenditure among individuals or households within an economy shifts deviates from a perfectly equal distribution, worsened between 1993 and 2005, the difference: from 0.30 to 0.32 in general, and from 0.28 to 0.29 in rural India (from 0.34-0 .37 in urban India) – suggests that the impact is less severe than critics have made it out to be. (Source: World Bank data) So things aren't so bad after all. BIBLIOGRAPHY http://data.worldbank.org/country/india Human Development Report 2010 – UNDP New Economic Policy: Indian State and Bureaucracy, CP Bhambhri, Social Scientist, Vol . 24, no. 1/3 (January - March 1996). World Bank Report on Malnutrition, 2005 March of the Elephant, Salil Tripathi, Mint: The 1990s, 2011Open Sesame, Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, Mint: The 1990s, 2011