Abstract

While India started out the twentieth century as the “Jewel in the Crown,” for most of the post-independence period, India's economy laid claim to a range of unenviable metaphors such as “Hindu rate of growth,” the “license Raj,” and the “lumbering elephant.” It would not be unfair to judge the twentieth century as a lost economic century except the past 25 years have been an entirely different story from the economic history of India from 1900 to 1985.