Sandeep Shah

This is an excellent piece by Anuj Ji & Piyush Ji. Leave everything whatever you are doing and give it a read. I will add a little further to this... Licence Raj trained an entire generation of Indian promoters to see the state as patron, not referee. We did not build a global brand under that system; we built relationships in Delhi. We did not out-innovate a competitor; we got them denied a licence. 35 years of liberalisation opened the market, but nobody ever forced Indian industry to unlearn the reflex. So when the doors opened, the smartest move for a promoter raised on that system was not "go build the next Samsung", it was "sign a JV with the actual Samsung, take the margin, keep the family holding intact, let Seoul do the risk." That is a rational response to 70 years of being taught the state, not the global market, is the thing we have to win over. This hangover survived 1991 because the people running economic policy after liberalisation were often the same intellectual class that designed the licence system in the first place, just administering a slightly more open version of it. Nobody with real skin in nation-building asked Indian promoters the one question the chaebols were asked: what have you built that the world actually needs? We opened the market to foreign capital and called it reform. We never demanded reciprocity, because demanding anything of capital still smelled, to that class, faintly of the socialism they had just supposedly abandoned. What has changed only in the last decade is the beginning of an actual answer: - PLI schemes with output tied to targets - Atmanirbhar Bharat as a stated doctrine rather than an embarrassed afterthought - a govt finally willing to say India's market access is worth something and should be priced accordingly - semiconductor missions, defence indigenisation, a state that negotiates from strength instead of gratitude. Anuj Ji & Piyush Ji's sunset-clause proposal is exactly the next honest step: stop being polite about protection, make it transactional, make firms earn it by winning abroad.