Kitaab – Books in Discussion
“The Lost Decade 2008 – 2018”
by Puja Mehra, Journalist

Friday | 23 August 2019 | 11.00 am – 12.30 pm

Organised by The International Centre Goa

Chair: Dr Pushkar, Director, ICG

Entry free & open to general public

PUJA MEHRA is a New Delhi-based journalist. In a reporting career of over seventeen years, she has covered government, especially the finance ministry and other economic ministries, Planning Commission, its successor NITI Aayog, Prime Minister’s Office and Parliament. She won the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award in 2008 and 2009 for her stories on the impact of the Lehman Brothers’ collapse-triggered financial meltdown and the subsequent global economic downturn in India’s economy. She has been the economics editor of The Hindu. Puja received her MA in economics from Delhi School of Economics.

Before the global financial meltdown of 2008, India’s economy was thriving and its GDP growth was cruising at an impressive 8.8 per cent. The economic boom impacted a large section of Indians, even if unequally. With sustained high growth over an extended period, India could have achieved what economists call a ‘take-off’ (rapid and self-sustained GDP growth). The global financial meltdown disrupted this momentum in 2008.

In the decade that followed, each time the country’s economy came close to returning to that growth trajectory, political events knocked it off course. In 2019, India’s GDP is growing at the rate of 7 per cent, making it the fastest-growing major economy in the world, but little on the ground suggests that Indians are actually better off. Economic discontent and insecurity are on the rise, farmers are restive and land-owning classes are demanding quotas in government jobs. The middle class is palpably disaffected, the informal economy is struggling and big businesses are no longer expanding aggressively. India is not the star it was in 2008 and in effect, the ‘India growth story’ has devolved into ‘growth without a story’. The Lost Decade tells the story of the slide and examines the political context in which the Indian economy failed to recover lost momentum.