Journalist-writer Hindol Sengupta’s book on entrepreneurial ventures in India has been shortlisted for the U.S.’ prestigious Hayek Prize this year.
Recasting India: How Entrepreneurship is Revolutionizing the World’s Largest Democracy is among the six books in race for the $50,000 prize awarded by the Manhattan Institute each year to writers whose work best celebrates the principles of Austro-Hungarian Nobel laureate in economics, Friedrich von Hayek.
The book, published by Palgrave Macmillan Trade, encapsulates real stories of extraordinary enterprise of ordinary people.
With case studies from a flourishing cold storage and fruit processing unit in Kashmir, which has lost a generation to violence, to the astounding story of the class X educated Dalit girl and now a successful businessperson, Kalpana Saroj, and the story of 20 women who moved from manual scavenging to set up a detergent factory, he has penned stories of those who are channelising their frustrations, fears, anxieties and dreams into entrepreneurial fervour.
Other shortlisted books include The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash that Cured Itself by James Grant; The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government by Philip K. Howard; The Market and Other Orders (The Collected Works of F A Hayek) by F.A. Hayek, edited by Bruce Caldwell; Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia by Karen Dawisha; and The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly. The winner will be announced in late February.
