Economics of India: How to Fool all People for all Times (Hardbound - 2019)

The book Economics of India: How to Fool all People for all Times has been presented in a series of articles and essays on different subjects of the Indian economy and attempts to provide a different view. Most of the subjects are contemporary and hence can be related with the controversies and the view being provided by the author. A lot of data has been used to substantiate the arguments made.

This book contains 37 chapters which have been grouped under various headings like government and our perceptions, specific programmes of the government, fiscal issues, monetary policy and inflation, and so on. To maintain some semblance of cohesiveness chapters have been bracketed under 11 broad headings. The standalone chapters in each section directly lay before the reader the issue and provide the commonly held view and then attempts to provide the counter-view supported by facts and theory.

The technical language as well as the presentation of the book is good. The book starts with a section on preliminaries, which is more of a background of the economy and the flow of the economy since reforms were introduced in the nineties. The first section puts the government in focus and tackles issues more from the policy front to begin with. The second set of articles comprises commentaries on specific policies of the government which have been either criticized or presented as being path breaking. In the third section, issues relating to the budgets have been discussed. The next set of chapters goes into the realm of monetary policy and addresses the issue of inflation; banking sectors, external side of the economy, Make in India campaign, agriculture sector, poverty, market space and commodity trading, etc.

This book will be useful for the students of Economics, particularly those taking competitive exams such as Civil Services, RBI, banks, etc. Also, it will be useful for policy makers and business professionals.

Madan Sabnavis is a postgraduate in Economics from Delhi School of Economics and graduated in Economics (Honours) from St Stephen’s College, Delhi University. He has been a corporate Economist since 1987 and worked with various organizations in the fields of development banking (erstwhile ICICI Limited), commercial banking (ICICI Bank), engineering (Larsen & Toubro), commodity markets (NCDEX) and credit rating (CARE Ratings, where he is presently employed).

Such varied experience in different sectors has enabled him forming diverse perspectives from the standpoint of an economist. This has helped him in interpreting economic issues in a different manner thus resembling the views of a contrarian.

An author of over 2000 articles since 1988, he is a regular contributor to Financial Express, Economic Times, Business Line and First Post and has had columns in Business Standard and Mint in the past. He is a prolific reviewer of books in Financial Express and Business World. All articles published after mid-2007 may be read on his blogspot: www.madansabnavis.blogspot.com. He also features in various discussions on economic policy and developments on TV channels such as NDTV Profit, BTVi, ET NOW, CNBC Awaz, Rajya Sabha TV, BBC, Reuters and CNBC.

He is the author of two books, Macroeconomics Demystified and Eco Quirks. He has also written a booklet on Working of Commodity Markets in India for Forum of Free Enterprise.