The Hindu : National : Manmohan for liberal visa regime

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 04, 2007
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National

National

Manmohan for liberal visa regime

Special Correspondent

New Delhi: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh favours a more liberal visa regime for research scholars from abroad but confesses that he has not been able to convince his ministerial colleagues on this count. "I would like our visa regime as well as the policies of our universities and research institutions to be more liberal," he said on Saturday, while launching a book, Democracy and Diversity at his residence.

Dr. Manmohan Singh recalled that when the Second Five-Year Plan was being formulated, Jawaharlal Nehru had advised the Planning Commission to invite the free market guru Milton Friedman to do a critique on what was being planned. The Prime Minister noted that India needed to continue that "commitment to dialogue."

Exhorting the social science community to come up with ideas that would "illuminate our choices" in sorting out persisting problems of governance, the Prime Minister observed that democracy was the key to our "social and economic salvation." The burden of democracy, according to him, was to balance the need for dissent and the requirement of consensus building in the society.

Edited by the former diplomat, K. Shankar Bajpai, Democracy and Diversity is a comparative look at the experience of democracy in India and United States.

The function was attended by a large number of social scientists, scholars and writers.

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