As the tricolour rose across the country on Independence Day, the conversation around India’s journey ended up, as always, in a debate. On one side, restless Gen Z people chasing start-ups and global opportunity. On the other, a louder, more insistent national debate about shedding the country’s colonial hangover. Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council and a historian, believes these are not two separate conversations at all.
On Independence Day, PM’s Economic Advisory Council member Sanjeev Sanyal tells NDTV’s Gaurie Dwivedi that India’s real challenge isn’t picking the right policy — it’s building enough flexibility to survive a world with no certainties left.
Where Sanyal turned most animated was on decolonisation — a subject he has long argued extends well beyond textbooks, though he was clear that the battle is largely won. Sanyal’s central argument is that there is no master plan, and there shouldn’t be one. “Anybody who wants a grand plan, where we know exactly how things are going to play out. His prescription, instead, is what he called flexibility and optionality — building a system resilient enough to absorb shocks, whichever way they come. He extended this logic to India’s foreign policy, where the country sits simultaneously in the G20, the Quad, at G7 tables as an invitee, and within BRICS. But he flagged three areas where the hangover persists, often invisibly.
I’m afraid you can’t do that,” he said, pointing to how comprehensively COVID-19 upended every projection made in January 2020. On the numbers, Sanyal noted India is now the third-largest economy in the world by purchasing power parity, contributing close to 8 per cent of global output, and the fifth-largest in current dollar terms at roughly $4.2 trillion — just behind Japan, and currently the fastest-growing major economy. Asked what single policy shift could unlock the scale of wealth creation India aspires to — tracing the arc from the scarcity of the post-1947 decades, through the licence raj of the 1970s and 80s, to today’s top-three global economy ambitions — Sanyal was unequivocal that no such single lever exists. School textbooks up to Class 9, he said, have already shed the colonial and Marxist framing that dominated Indian education for decades, and he was directly involved in rewriting the economics portions.
“The issues you have raised are actually not unconnected,” Sanyal said. The same principle, he said, drives India’s expanding web of free-trade agreements. But he was quick to temper the optimism: divide that economy by the world’s largest population, and India remains, in per capita terms, a fairly poor country — which is why, he said, safety nets have to be built even as the country tries to climb. The first is academia: Indian professors, he said, are effectively forced to publish in international journals — specifically those on the ABDC list, an index issued by an Australian body — to get promoted, regardless of the quality of work published in Indian journals. “We have consequently colonised ourselves,” he said, “by perpetuating a system where we seek foreign validation.”
