By TCA Ranganathan
The economic debate in India nowadays is about the post-Covid recovery. Such debates beget a question which troubled a WhatsApp doctor faced by a patient of uncertain health. The doctor is depicted commenting, ‘before we talk about your return to normalcy, we need to be confident that you were normal in the first place.’ It was perhaps these or similar doubts which had so troubled the newly anointed Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee that he along with Gita Gopinath, Raghuram Rajan and Mihir S Sharma, jointly released a co-edited book What the Economy Needs Now containing essays by fourteen eminent economists. The range is diverse, moving from ‘Healthcare’ to ‘Schools’ to ‘Land Markets’ to ‘Women Work Force’ to ‘Welfare Reform’ and from ‘Reforming Energy’ to ‘The Environment and Climate Change’. It is not the quality of the essays which generates interested speculation (each of the essays is by a well-recognized domain expert and represents focused thought) as the fact that such a book was considered necessary well before the Covid induced economic meltdown in a country which boasts of seven decades of development oriented governance and to secure which it has created, not only the world’s largest but also the most empowered and well entrenched economic bureaucracy.