"A view to the south : India and the Indian Ocean" a talk by Prof. Ashok Desai, Business World, at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 20th February 2013

Time : 3:00 pm

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : Seminar Room, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
Venue Info :  Events | About | Map | Nearest Metro Station - 'Race Course(Yellow Line)'

Event Description : Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to ‘A view to the south : India and the Indian Ocean’ a talk by Prof. Ashok Desai, Business World, New Delhi.
As part of ‘India and the wider World’ Series.
India inherited from the colonial period a certain worldview, that colonization had displaced it from the position of being the world’s most industrialized economy and held it back in the era of mechanization. The government of independent India tried to redress this injustice and promoted industrialization. It failed to note that industrialization without competition does not work. The crisis of 1991 forced it to revisit its preconceptions, and it opened the economy to internal and international forces of competition in the next two decades. The resulting surge in growth is now exhausted, and India needs to find a new engine of growth. I will suggest that India should look for it in marine transport, which is much cheaper than land transport. It should
develop the technologies of building small ports and ships, and use it to develop a large number of ports on its coast as well as in other countries in the Indian Ocean; it should then expand economic activity on the basis of trade between those ports.

Speaker : Prof. Ashok Desai is Consultant Editor of The Telegraph, the premier Indian
daily newspaper; his columns in the newspaper as well as in Business World magazine are an authoritative commentary on economic events in India. Before joining the newspaper, Desai served as Chief Consultant in the Finance Ministry from 1991 to 1993, and helped design the early economic reforms that the government carried out. His inputs in the reform of taxation,
trade policy and regulation of financial markets were particularly notable. In the 1980s, Desai coordinated a large survey of energy research for International Development Research Centre in Ottawa. In the 1970s, Desai taught and researched at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji as well as the University of Sussex in England. Earlier, Desai worked as an economist in National Council of Applied Economic Research in Delhi, where he carried out policy-oriented industrial studies, especially studies on technology development and transfer. Amongst his writings are: India’s Telecommunications Industry: History, Analysis, Diagnosis (2006), India: A strategy for Further Reforms (2000), The Price of Onions(1999),(Chairman): Report of the
Task Force on Capital Markets, 1998, (Ed): Economic Reforms: The Next Step. Vol.
1, 1998, My Economic Affair(1993), (Ed): Energy Review Series, 15 vols. 1986-88,
Foreign Technology and Investment: Their Role in India’s Industrialization 1971, Real Wages in Germany, Clarendon Press, 1968.

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