Globalisation is very powerful, and if it is not well managed by governments and people, the bad may be more than good, former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Y.V Reddy has said.
Delivering a lecture on "Globalisation and India" on Tuesday at the Dr. Y.V.S. Murty auditorium at a programme organised by the Centre for Policy Studies, he said India was forced to take the path of economic reforms after the balance of payments crisis in the early 1990s triggered by the Gulf war.
Asia would play a crucial role in the shift of global power balance from the West to the East with incremental economic activity and trade likely to shift considerably to Asia. “Though advanced economies are way ahead of the developing economies, India will inevitably be an important part of the shift in power balances,” he observed.
Book on Abid Hussain
Earlier, he released a book, Shaping India's future - Essays in Memory of Abid Hussain , brought out by the centre.
Dr Reddy, who was the chairman of the 14th Finance Commission, observed that in the decades after Independence, with self-reliance being the guiding principle, "India missed the bus in the late Seventies and early Eighties" during the Chinese surge.
Global economy
"China and Russia joined the World Bank, but we did not renew our relationship with the global economy. Many of the developing countries were at that time adopting outward-oriented policies, particularly with regard to trade. We continued illogical self-reliance policies. ‘Reagonomics’ and ‘Thatcherism’ were bringing about a fundamental rethinking about the relationship between the State and the market and we were not even discussing them," he said.
Dr Reddy spoke about his role in ushering in the reforms in the various government ministries, his stints in the World Bank and the IMF, and as the Deputy Governor of the RBI and finally its Governor.
Beginning the lecture on a nostalgic note, he recalled how he started his career in Visakhapatnam in the late Sixties when Abid Hussian was the district Collector.
"The city, 50 years ago, was a small university town and port town, with the Hindustan Shipyard Limited and the BHPV being the major units.
There was a single flight to Hyderabad a day by Indian Airlines at that time. Now Vizag is a part of Indian network of cities and on the way to becoming a part of the global network," he remarked.
President of CPS A. Prasanna Kumar welcomed the gathering and former Chairman of the A.P. State Council of Higher Education K.C. Reddy spoke about the book on Abid Hussain.
