THE POLITICAL ECONOMY IN INDIA: 1951-1991

The article defines the perimeter of political economy as an independent field of enquiry emerging out of the discipline of International Relations during the growth of behavioral approaches in the study of global politics. This understanding is applied to trace the development of political economy in India from 1951 to 1991 to assess how the post-colonial economy grew to adopt the neo-liberal measures in 1991. The study analyses the impulses that prompted the policy direction soon after independence in 1947, during the 1960s and 1970s and finally in the 1980s to prepare the economy with modest neo-liberal economic measures. Peter Evans? theory of embedded autonomy has been used to study the nature of state intervention in economic affairs and Michal Kalecki?s concept of intermediate classes in intermediate regimes have been applied to understand how certain classes have always stood to gain more from policy planning, irrespective of the orientation of policies.