ABSTRACT
During the 1980s the Indian economy reached and sustained a pace of growth well above that of the first three decades of independence. At the end of the decade, as agriculture has recovered from the extremely severe drought of 1987, an unprecedented surge of output has catapulted the national economy into the 1990s. What has been most remarkable about India's post-independence experience with economic growth is the constancy of the policy framework within which that growth has occurred. There is a broad and enduring national consensus about the function of the economy in India's diverse society and about the nature of the government's role in the economy. India's economic growth in the 1980s was felt across all of the economy's sectors, although not exactly evenly. Good agricultural years in 1988-89 and 1989-90 raised the decade's average growth of farm output to the neighborhood of 2.9 percent, in line with long-term trends.
