Late Industrial Revolution in India

A major break with the past occurred in 1991. India started giving up its dirigiste economic policies and started liberalising her economy. Although much of what we now refer to as economic liberalisation has actually been ad hoc, piecemeal unstructured and has happened at various points of time from 1991. However the exception to this is the industrial sector, where an overarching New Industrial Policy of 1991 sounded the death knell of the cumbersome industrial licensing procedure for the first time and thus effectively lowered the high entry barriers. This should have spurned a large number of new firms to enter India’s industrial sector, dominated hitherto by a few known large business houses.

In short the liberalisation was to have unleashed a wave of new entrepreneurs to emerge. The book under review seeks to provide empirical substantiation to this important epoch-making phenomena so significant that the author refers to it as an “industrial revolution” although happening towards the end of the 20th century.