It has been over twenty years since the unlikely combination of PV Narasimha Rao as Prime Minister and his Oxford-educated Finance Minister finally released (this is what they claim) the Indian economy is in a crushing situation. government control. It was a rotten edifice based on institutionalized scarcity, wildly illogical price controls, hilariously shoddy products, protectionism and rampant underperformance that was quickly demolished in 100 days of inspired action. The socialist utopia fueled by the fevered imagination of Nehru and Mahalanobis, which seemed forever doomed to rot at the so-called 'Hindu growth rate', was now dead and buried, just like them. In the iconic Union Budget of 1991, Singh presented the new budget. Economic Policy or NEP, which reversed decades and decades of ineffective policies. Some features of this policy included abolition of industrial licensing, removal of reservation of industries for public sector, removal of threshold limit on assets and most interestingly, automatic approval of foreign investments up to 51 % in specified and high priority industries. Stabilization was also a priority, with new measures such as the abolition of export subsidies and the restructuring of fertilizer subsidies, reducing the crushing budget deficit from 8.4% in 1991 to a slightly more manageable level of 5%. .7% in 1993. What were the effects of these reforms on daily life? ? In fact, there were multiple of them. Average real incomes have quadrupled (Rajadhyaksha, Open Sesame, 2011), resulting in an increase in living standards. Consumer spending came into its own and it became easier for individuals to borrow from banks. Banks, in turn, began offering better interest rates and auto, home and personal loan programs. As a result, consumer ownership shifts... middle of paper ...... over a given period of time through the extent to which the distribution of income or consumption expenditures among individuals or households within of an economy deviating from a perfectly equal distribution, worsened between 1993 and 2005, the difference - from 0.30 to 0.32 in total, and from 0.28 to 0.29 in India rural (0.34 to 0.37 in urban India) – suggests the impact is less severe than critics made it out to be. (Source: World Bank data) So things are not so bad after all. . 24, No. 1/3 (January - March 1996). World Bank Malnutrition Report, 2005 Elephant Walk, Salil Tripathi, Mint: The 1990s, 2011 Open Sesame, Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, Mint: The 1990s, 2011