ABSTRACT
New Delhi newspapers proclaimed the winter of 1991–1992 one of the coldest in twenty years. The temperatures dipped below zero degrees Celsius with startling regularity. In the north, at least thirty people on record died of exposure. These treacherous conditions coincided with other phenomena often described as similarly unpredictable and uncontrollable: the slow but steady enactment of economic policies that we now commonly refer to as neoliberalism. “There is no alternative,” or TINA, encapsulates Margaret Thatcher's approach to UK's downsizing and privatization policies in the 1980s. Rajiv Gandhi's government designated its related economic shift in the mid-1980s using a less draconian description, the “New Economic Policy” (NEP). “Loan conditionalities” and “austerity measures” in late 1991 and early 1992 were buzzwords for the onset of globalization in India. 1 In the summer of 1991, the Indian government paid for old International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans with a new, bigger loan, one that was larded with structural adjustment demands on Indian monetary policy, governance, and spending priorities.
