Independent India has so far seen twenty-five finance ministers, each of whom presented at least one full Budget. However, only a handful of them could leave their mark on the exchequer, or North Block, the headquarters of India's finance ministry.
India's Finance Ministers: From Independence to Emergency (1947-1977) is the story of India's unforgettable finance ministers who shaped the country's economy in the first thirty years since Independence. The book highlights the big difference that these finance ministers made to the management of the Indian economy as well as to government policies, and, thus, left an indelible mark on the national psyche. It attempts to measure the impact these finance ministers had not only on India's economic system but also on its political system, and to what extent their decisions were influenced by their socio-economic backgrounds.
Full of interesting anecdotes, the book is the first in-depth exploration of the crucial role finance ministers play in the functioning of India's economy.
A.K. BHATTACHARYA, AKB to every journalist, set the bar for business reporting as the chief of bureau at the Economic Times in the early 1990s, the decade of major economic reforms.
He had a ringside view to many other disruptions, creative and otherwise, during his four decades in journalism-a journey that started when he switched careers after a year of teaching. AKB then went on to become the editor of the Pioneer and Business Standard. He is now Business Standard's editorial director and writes a long-running column in that paper. He is also the author of The Rise of Goliath. This is his second book.
Independent India has so far seen twenty-five finance ministers, each of whom stayed long enough in the saddle to have presented at least one full Budget. The role of a finance minister is uniquely important and critical in governance and policymaking in any nation. Understanding the manner in which a nation's finance ministers deal with policy matters is also another way of revisiting its economic history. A finance minister's job is not just to present the annual statement of government finances or the Budget. It is also to provide leadership to all the key economic policies pertaining to the finances of the government and its policies on trade and industry. Politically also, the finance minister is a key member of a government's top policymaking team, or the Cabinet. The finance minister's relationship with the prime minister is a key element when it comes to the manner in which the economic policies of a government are framed and implemented. Indeed, the quality of the relationship between the prime minister and the finance minister often determines the quality of policy and economic governance in a country. India is no exception.
In an ideal world, the performance and exploits of all the twenty-five finance ministers of India so far should be captured in a single volume for ease of access and readability. However, the sheer scale of what these finance ministers achieved and the economic policy challenges each faced and tried to address is difficult to compress in a single volume without doing injustice to most of them. Hence, the present volume focuses only on ten finance ministers, who led the Indian government's exchequer from 1947 to 1977. It is interesting to note that during this period two prime ministers (Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi) presented a full Budget each while holding additional charge of the finance ministry.
These thirty years were not only eventful for India's economy and its many public institutions involved in economic governance, but they were also witness to the new direction the finance ministers during that period gave to India's economic development.
It is important to note that this period broadly corresponds with the longest uninterrupted rule of the Congress at the Centre for three decades when there were three prime ministers: Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi. Politically, this is an important phase, as it captures a period that began with India gaining independence in 1947 and ended with it hurtling into the Emergency in 1975, when the democratic rights of Indians remained suspended for the next nineteen months. It is needless to point out that economic policies too reflected the swinging political mood in these three decades.
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