In another paper, “The costs of gradual and hesitant liberalization: India”, Srinivasan quotes Angus Maddison to claim that India experienced positive economic development between 1870 and 1913 and that pretend-historian Deepak Lal industrial development at a rate higher even than Germany between 1880 and 1913.

Put all this pretend-history against the fact that China, the most populous country of the world went through also the biggest famines in recorded history, amounting perhaps to more than 60 million deaths in the 19th century alone, and that India, the second most populous country globally, experienced around 17 million deaths from famine between 1876 and 1913. Maddison’s estimates of Indian income are based on Heston’s calculations, which used the same assumption as Curzon’s chosen apologist of imperial rule, F. J. Atkinson, namely, that productivity in agriculture remained constant over the period concerned. This again goes against all the available evidence of inputs and outcomes — very little investment in irrigation except in a few pockets, deaths of millions of livestock in famines, no credit to farmers for investment and so on. Let us then look at the improvements in non-income indicators: in India, the expectation of life at birth for males was 26.2 years over 1881-91 and 22.2 years over 1891-1901, rising to 25.3 years over 1901-11, and again falling to 21.8 years over 1911-21. In 1901, the literacy rate in India was 9.80 per hundred males and 0.60 per hundred females. By 1911, the corresponding figures had gone up to 10.60 and 1.10 respectively. Wonderful achievement for the kind of globalisation Srinivasan loves, is that not so?

If Srinivasan is so unreliable for earlier history of human and economic development, is he a better guide to the history of his much-loved financial integration? Does he know that the biggest domestic banks in India, the government-backed Presidency were not allowed to engage in any foreign exchange business, which was kept as the monopoly of the so-called exchange banks, or that the developing (read colonial or ex-colonial) were herded into one group and had very limited access to capital markets in the globalisation boom period he celebrates?

His grasp of more recent developments in the global economy is as unreliable as his grasp of its earlier history. In South Korea and Taiwan, contrary to what Srinivasan asserts, import substitution and export promotion policies of industrialisation and the former played a highly important role in building up their competitive prowess. In all of the stories of the emergence of East Asia as the fastest growing part of the world economy, social change spearheaded by land reforms played a critical part.

Srinivasan’s final chapter outlining the institutional reforms needed in India finds no place for land reforms, affirmative action or anything creating a more real equality of opportunity in this caste-and community-diverse nation.

The purely ideological and pro-rich, pro-imperialist stance of his pronouncements comes out clearly when he has the gall to invoke some version of the Pareto-optimality ‘theorem’ in advocating, when every undergraduate student of economics knows that not only can the conditions of perfect competition required never hold in reality but also that the theorem is entirely insensitive to distribution. Under certain conditions, Bill Gates becoming the owner of the whole world and the rest working for him can be Pareto efficient. Srinivasan entirely ignores the role of imperialism in reducing India and China, the two major manufacturing countries of the world in 1750, — producing more than half of world manufactures at that date, — to being reduced to the production of less than 10 per cent of global manufactures in 1913. This obliviousness is matched by his ignorance of the processes of liberalisation and privatisation that produced economic mayhem in most of Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, rendered Argentina — at one time the richest economy of Latin America — a basket case by 2001, following precisely the policies that Srinivasan would recommend. This list of errors and omissions can go on and on. It is alarming that many of these papers were delivered as prestigious lectures in some of the top academic institutions of the country.

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