During the decades that followed independence, when India liberalized its economy and companies needed government permission to raise capital or expand operations, Indian businesses competed while figuring out how to master a byzantine bureaucracy. Then, there were strict limits on private businesses: about whether they could lay off employees or which sectors they could invest in, for example. But in 1991, then-Indian Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and then-Finance Minister Manmohan Singh launched economic reforms that allowed Indian businesses to begin to flex their muscles. If the old Gujarat model made businesses succeed by keeping them away from the government’s tentacles, the version embraced by Modi and Adani now blurs the lines between the state and the private sector.
Salil Tripathi, ‘Gautam Adani and the New Indian Capitalism’, Foreign Policy
