Our popular discourse is obsessed with what should or should not be taught in schools. This mostly relates to history-medieval, and even ancient Indian history. Our guest for this episode has her own lament in this regard, though the history she's talking about is a lot more modern, hence relevant to our present challenges and opportunities. Shruti Rajagopalan, Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, thinks modern India's economic history needs to have a chapter of its own, in schools and universities, so the next generation gets a real sense of what life was like under socialism, and how an extreme shortage economy held us back for over 40 years after independence, until liberalisation in the '90s allowed India to dream beyond a Bajaj scooter. 

Shruti shares several insightful anecdotes, all underlining that liberalisation hasn't been taught or understood as much as it needs to. It's perhaps the hush-hush nature of the exercise which meant that we never fully followed through on market reforms that could have rescued Indian manufacturing from the stagnation it's witnessing today. In this hour-long conversation with FED Director Rahul Ahluwalia, Shruti shares her prescription on what's needed to repeat that pivotal moment in our history. "It's a bit like how Ernest Hemingway described going bankrupt. Gradually, then suddenly." It will be largely down to well-meaning folks in policy, academia and civil society, who must keep the iron hot, which means we must continuously advocate for economic reforms, so that when the political window opens, the deregulation sentiment can be written into law.  

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