The world economy is at a crossroads. All the shibboleths of the past lie shattered. It is this context that makes Arun Maira’s book Reimagining India’s economy particularly relevant.

Maira has worn many hats — corporate honcho (he had a long stint with the Tata group), consultant (Boston Consulting Group), policymaker (he was a member of the erstwhile Planning Commission) and later in life his stint with international NGO HelpAge International.

This gives him both an insider and an outsider view of how societies work. He has also written books (12 including this, and counting) and articles on ‘compassionate capitalism’ explaining the necessity to create capitalism with a human face.

Maira believes that many of the economic metrics, chiefly measuring the economy’s success through GDP growth, need to be discarded. He’s clearly not a fan of what he calls “growth obsession”. The economy’s success, according to him, must be measured by the number of jobs it creates and not necessarily the growth it generates.

Though he doesn’t altogether dismiss the role of growth, he feels an excessive focus on it misses many more crucial aspects of the economy.

Industrial journey

This book is a part memoir and part agenda-setting — Maira talks about how his family had to move from Pakistan to India after partition and build a new life. The part where he describes his stint with TELCO (now Tata Motors) and the valuable mentorship of Sumant Moolgaokar is particularly interesting. It gives us a good glimpse of how Indian industry navigated the policy maze through the 1960s to 1980s — when baby steps to expose Indian industry to global competition were taken.

Maira is disturbed by many aspects of India’s economy — growing inequality, environmental degradation, lack of good jobs and the dangers of the demographic dividend being frittered away.

The book is divided into three sections. In the first, Maira talks about his early days in school and college and the career choices he faced and why he chose to join the Tata group in the mid-1960s instead of the civil services. This first section also has a chapter on industrial policy and why it has come back into fashion after two decades. Maira discusses the divergent paths taken by India and China and how China emerged as the manufacturing hub of the world while India lost out, despite both countries starting at the same base in 1991.

Maira argues that the renewed focus on industrial policy now is due to the political pressures, both in India and the West, to create more jobs. But a mere increase in the share of manufacturing is not enough to create more jobs. Industrial policy also must focus on the pattern of manufacturing and industrial enterprises that needs to be promoted. Maira advocates a ‘systems view’ for industrial policy, where the interlinkages of the various parts of the industrial economy — labour, skilling, taxes, subsidies and so on — need to be looked at in their entirety and not in silos as that would be counterproductive. Coordination and communication between the various actors in the industrial system is crucial and here Maira cites Japan’s example.

In the next chapter, Maira analyses the conflict between capitalism and democracy and how this needs to be resolved. His prescription for “a restoration of the balance between the principles of capitalism and democracy” are — reforming multilateral institutions (WTO for instance), listening to people more carefully and designing “social enterprises” where people at the bottom of the pyramid become “wealth-creators too”.

The power of listening

Maira says that though the economic reforms since 1991 led to rapid growth lifting many millions out of poverty, yet India’s record of improving the lives of the poor pales in comparison to China and Vietnam. In the second section, which is rather theoretical, Maria talks about economic, social and natural systems and their interconnections.

In the third section, Maira discusses the future of India’s economy in the backdrop of a ‘Trumpian world’. The growing income inequality and ‘economic precarity’ of a large number of Indians, the environmental degradation and the unique challenges thrown up by demographic shifts (ageing societies) are analysed.

Maira calls for a bottom-up approach to development where ‘listening closely’ to people on the ground is more important than grand plans drawn up by economists and policy makers from the above. He says that economists and policy makers have much to unlearn. Crafting policies through listening to those at the bottom of the pyramid is the way to go. Maira’s stint with HelpAge International, where he had the opportunity to travel to various parts of the world to see how senior citizens are taken care of, gave him this insight of the “power to listen”.

The first sign of building a compassionate and caring society is is how carefully we “listen”. Maira argues that the “top-down” technocratic approach is responsible to creating many of the current day economic problems. While dealing with the environment and the “problem of commons”, community-led solutions are best suited where listening to the people plays an integral role.

Maira does not give a detailed blueprint of the “reimagined economy” and that perhaps was not his intention. Through this book Maria wants to spark a conversation on many of the crucial issues facing us today.

Written in an easy and engaging style, this book will interest both policymakers and lay readers concerned about the future of India.

Check out the book on amazon

Published on October 8, 2025