Manmohan Singh inculcated a sense of purpose

I am not sure who was the real architect of India's economic reforms. Manmohan Singh is credited by many, but I think it was the acumen of a shrewd and pragmatic politician in P V Narsimha Rao which made an effort to free India from the shackles of Licence Raj, tried to open up the economy, and with it liberalise the mindset of a large section of the Indian population. Who ever is credited with initiating economic reforms in India, the Rao-Singh duo gave Economics students like me a sense of purpose in internalising what we were learning as part of an academic discipline.

I was a third year Economics Honours student in St. Xavier's College, Kolkata, when the economic reforms were initiated in 1991. A few of us bestowed upon ourselves a sense of obligation to comprehend what was happening. It was later described as one of the biggest policy upheavals in independent India. 
That was the time when I was introduced to the pink papers  or business broadsheets, took interest in seminars organised by various chambers of commerce and trade bodies, came to know about journals like the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), Mainstream, Seminar etc and subscribed to the Indian Economic Survey and Yojna, a journal brought out by the Government of India. 

Many of these collections remained unread but still occupy the dusty cupboards of my ancestral house in Belgharia. Everytime I visit them, my parents insist on getting rid of the bundles of papers turned red and flaky journals wrapped nicely in a plastic packet to retain their historical value of bearing the testimony of a watershed moment in the history of post-independent India.   

Much to our dismay and surprise, not a single word was uttered inside the classrooms about the tectonic shifts that were shaping the Indian economy for decades to come. Few of us, including Ritwik Mukherjee, Joydip Bhattacharya, would huddle in Arun Da's canteen and try to collectively comprehend the so called liberating moment of the Indian economy and with it the archaic and inward looking mindset of the policymakers. 

We were too naive to take any call as to whether liberalisation was good or bad for the Indian economy and would often sit blank-faced in seminars and symposiums, but there was a sense of collective restlessness for not being able to decipher the hitherto unknown lexicons of the new economy that was to take over.

Ritwik used to work in a newspaper then and that made it easier for us to ensure invitations to important meetings organised by the chambers of commerce and gain access to trade bodies. We didn't understand much but there was a sense of euphoria for being part of a milestone in the history of independent India. Some of us, the students also derived as sense of purpose for studying Economics  as an academic discipline. 

For me, Economics taught within the confines of classrooms and at private tuition centres were as if insulated from the real world. In the few years that I studied Economics before 1991, I literally struggled in establishing its link to our daily lives. But the motivation for me in studying the subject was to understand the socio-political and economic factors that affected human behaviour and relations. 

Economic liberalisation was that very moment which gave us an opportunity to carry out a reality check of the academic initiatives to educate young minds. Dr Singh deserves my thanks and praise for being the steward of a significant change in history that made Economics more palatable and grounded personally for me. In a way, he being an economist also thrust upon us a self-imposed moral obligation to ensure and explain as to why economics is an important guiding force behind political decision-making. 

As he demits office at the end of his controversial, often ineffective and sometimes unassertive tenure as prime minister, Dr Singh deserves my gratitude for playing a role in transforming the Indian economy which in effect gave us an opportunity to enjoy Economics as an academic discipline. It also inculcated a sense of purpose in Economics students like me, which later extended to a wider realm of social sciences.  

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