ABSTRACT
This is a volume dedicated in honour of Professor Sunanda Sen. The papers in this volume, with two exceptions (those by Utsa Patnaik and Arun Kumar, who were her colleagues at JNU) have been written by her students, whose ideas about the Indian economy – especially the external dimensions of the Indian economy – have been shaped by her interest in the topic. 1 India’s external dimensions – during both the colonial and the post-colonial periods – have remained the focus of Professor Sen’s research. Her work Colonies and Empire is still considered highly important for its analysis of the drain of resources from colonies such as India to the empire of Britain. In fact, in this work she departed to a great extent from the standard understanding of the drain of resources from India to Britain through trade routes. While maintaining that there was a drain of resources through trade routes, she showed that financial routes played no less important a role in such drain. In the context of post-colonial India, her concern with the external dimensions of the Indian economy considers of matters from foreign trade to finance, including FDI and FPI flows – some of her major works are listed in the footnote to this chapter. She has analysed the facts and figures pertaining to the external aspects of the Indian economy both analytically and empirically. In the past fifteen years, she has focused on ‘emerging India’ under the neoliberal globalized regime. Her work, which largely takes its cues from post-Keynesian and radical traditions in political economy, remains critical of mainstream understandings of the Indian economy – particularly the understandings held by those in official circles and their coterie of economists. In most of her work, she has attempted to show how global factors play important roles in shaping the political economy of the external dimensions of the Indian economy. However, unlike many radicals, she remains open to ideas and analysis in her thinking. Keeping in mind her wide-ranging interests in India’s external economic dimensions – especially those pertaining to emerging India – the topics covered in this collection include transfer of resources both during colonial times and more recently (legally as well as illegally), exchange-rate management, MNCs and TRIPs in the reform period, regional trade agreements (RTAs) and the political economy of development planning in India. All but one article are in some sense critical of mainstream views of the Indian economy’s external economic dimensions. The paper on RTAs, in fact, indicates the potential for India to reap some benefits from RTAs at both the political and the economic level.
