Growth Is Good – Détails, épisodes et analyse

In this episode of Growth is Good, Rahul Ahluwalia is joined by Anand Prasad, co-founder of Trilegal, for a wide-ranging conversation on India’s legal system, economic growth, and the incentives that quietly shape how business actually works.Anand traces his journey from becoming a lawyer just after liberalisation to building one of India’s most influential corporate law firms. From there, the conversation moves into deeper questions:• Why breach of contract has become a “resource” rather than a deterrent• How delays, litigation, and weak enforcement slow down deal-making• Why technology alone can’t fix government systems without changing incentives• The role of culture — from “milord” courtrooms to the chalta-hai mindset• How regulation, corruption, and premature imitation shape everyday business decisionsUsing examples ranging from power sector reform to the pakoda-thela economy, this episode explores why India’s economy continues to function despite systemic friction — and what real reform would actually require.A candid, experience-driven conversation on law, incentives, culture, and growth.

What did it really mean to start a business under the Licence Raj? Why is socialism back as a “feel-good” word? And why do Amit Varma and Mohit Satyanand worry that we’re drifting away from the spirit of 1991, even as India’s young entrepreneurs give them hope?In this episode of Growth is Good, Rahul Ahluwalia sits down with writer–podcaster Amit Varma and investor–entrepreneur Mohit Satyanand to talk about India’s reforms, the return of soft socialism, and why defending economic freedom is never “finished business”. From Crax and DGT forms to luxury beliefs, Nordic myths and small-town founders raising crores, this is a wide-ranging conversation on growth, ideas and the politics that shape both.Tune in on YouTube: https://youtu.be/1duNg498QR8Subscribe to our newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/fedev.org/amitabh-kant-on-the-spirit-of-enterprise-indias-untapped-tourism-potential-shifting-migration-patterns-more-fed-june-newsletter-12817567

We’ve talked a lot in this podcast about what plagues India’s businesses. ‘Regulatory cholesterol’ is a term that comes up repeatedly. Our guest for this episode is a corporate lawyer who has helped his clients navigate the minefield that is entrepreneurship. Akshay Jaitly, Founding Partner at Trilegal, started out thinking about growth from the Nehruvian lens of redistribution, which was the founding paradigm for our regulatory regime that treats any entrepreneur as a soon-to-be crook. However, his years of experience as a practicing corporate lawyer exposed him to the day-to-day difficulties faced by his clients in trying to navigate through the ‘regulatory cholesterol’. If private investment is going to be the engine of growth, then we can’t have a regulatory regime that is biased towards businesses that succeed or fail based on their ability to manipulate their way through our regulatory systems. We must foster a climate of entrepreneurship that encourages value adding businesses to scale up.

To that end, Akshay shares a whole range of ideas, from the philosophical root causes of our malaise, to decriminalisation, replacing the empty threat of imprisonment with more actionable penalties, to using data for reform. At the core of it all is the fundamental belief that people must be trusted, hence their transactions, with the state and each other, must be smoothened. He also covers the incredible strains on India’s energy sector, and ways to rescue us from the precipice we find ourselves teetering over.

Every episode of Growth Is Good has delved into why we must reform India’s economic policies to unlock our manufacturing potential. Labour remains a critical aspect where reforms are needed, often attempted, but found difficult to implement. The politicised nature of the question has given birth to narratives that contrast worker wellbeing with industrial growth, as if both cannot coexist. India’s socialist imagination, which looks at big businesses with suspicion, doesn’t help the cause either. Given this state of affairs, it was refreshing to speak with Virjesh Upadhyay, a lifelong trade unionist who’s served as the General Secretary of the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, one of India’s largest trade unions. We were in agreement on many questions. Most of all, it was refreshing to hear that the labour movement wholeheartedly supports industrial growth. 

The question that remains then is how do we strike common ground on issues that still divide us and which have in the past driven a wedge so deep as to put important policy reforms in cold storage for decades. Here, Virjesh shared several anecdotes that underlined the importance of building relationships and cultivating an environment of trust amongst all stakeholders. The core belief that should drive all of our efforts? Our paths may differ, but we’re all striving for the same goal: Greater prosperity for all Indians.

Episode Chapters

(00:00) Episode Highlights

(02:36) Virjesh Upadhay on witnessing economic growth

(11:55) Making society a stakeholder in growth: lessons from '91

(16:02) Farm laws and where we went wrong

(21:13) Narrative building for implementing reforms

(28:28) Are India's tough labour laws holding back industrial growth?

(36:32) Building relationships for effecting policy reforms

(37:52) How dialogue helped breach Industry-Trade Union stalemate at Maruti

(46:14) Should government mandate minimum wages, overtime pay?

(48:40) The 90-hour workweek and pay disparity in industry

(49:38) Ethical business practices

(57:23) Virjesh Upadhyay's perspective on labour movement in India

Our guest for this episode is an employer who went beyond merely railing about the excessive compliances that Indian businesses must put up with. Manish Sabharwal, Vice-Chairman at TeamLease RegTech, remembers the number by heart – 26,134 – the number of different reasons an Indian employer can be put in jail. So do so many people from the industry, academia, and the government. ‘Jailed for Doing Business’, a 2022 report by TeamLease and the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), was the kind of seminal document that brought home the exact scale of India’s regulatory cholesterol, which inhibits innovation and entrepreneurship at every stage of a business’s life cycle.

In this hour-long conversation with FED Director Rahul Ahluwalia, Sabharwal admits that his earlier attempts at influencing policy outcomes for the Indian industry were overly philosophical. “But reform only happens when you make your ask specific, finite and actionable,” he says in this episode. Sabharwal has many actionable asks. They all circle back to shedding our regulatory weight, cutting down on bureaucratic excesses, and turning India into a lean and mean administrative machine that empowers businesses instead of limiting them.

“The job of the government is not to set things on fire. It is to create the conditions for spontaneous combustion.”

Episode chapters -

(00:00) - Terrorism & jobs: growing up in Kashmir

(12:20) - India's persistent 'regulatory cholesterol'

(23:15) - Is it becoming more difficult to advocate for economic growth?

(30:40) - India's inefficient welfare state

(43:30) - Politics vs economics

(51:10) - GDP growth for geopolitics and defence

Follow us on Twitter: https://x.com/fedev_india

Our guest for this episode, Tarun Bajaj, first stepped onto the field as an IAS Officer in 1988, just as India was about to shed its socialist baggage. While the country navigated the shift from scarcity to relative abundance, he had a ringside view (and several performing roles) of how the bureaucracy and political executive went from resisting to accepting the idea of the government giving up control of the economy.

By the time he retired in 2022, he had also served in the PMO, and then as Economic Affairs Secretary and later as the Revenue Secretary to the Government of India. He played a key role in shaping the Indian government's economic response to the Covid-19 pandemic and was also instrumental in stabilising the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime.

In this conversation with FED Director Rahul Ahluwalia, Bajaj shares several anecdotes and insights, including some from when he worked closely with the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi.  

Do watch the full video and follow to be notified about our upcoming episodes.

Episode Chapters: (02:33) - First brush with economic growth and its importance

(06:20) - India's controlled economy pre-liberalisation (1991)

(11:30) - Will India forget the lessons from the 'license raj'?

(13:38) - India's changing stance on wealth creation

(16:00) - Growth as a nation through the prism of cricket

(17:00) - Market reforms enabling progress

(19:30) - Geopolitics favouring India

(23:20) - Ease of doing business for SMEs

(25:00) - What's hindering reforms?

(29:25) - How can we move the needle on the ground?

(35:00) - How to convince politicians about reforms?

(36:20) - When Govt understood need for public capital expenditure

(38:30) - When the PM endorsed wealth creation

(41:50) - Working in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO)

(47:30) - What has constrained privatisation?

(51:00) - Money is stuck; pending judicial reforms

(54:00) - How lobbies oppose reforms

(56:00) - Secret behind Gurugram

(1:02:00) - India's economic response to Covid-19

Our guest for this episode of FED Dialogues is one of the strongest proponents of countries striving for GDP growth as a means of improving human lives at scale. American economist Lant Pritchett's arguments for growing the size of the pie are incisive and empirically driven, based on his work at the World Bank. He's done a lot of work in keeping alive the attention on the importance of growth by adding to the scholarship on how it is the strongest determinant for human development outcomes such as reducing child mortality or enhancing the standard of living of oppressed communities such as Dalits in India.

He also has a lot to say about 'income inequality', stuff that he admits may get him in trouble, but he says it anyway. So we hear his take on why the West may 'want' to believe that people in the Global South don't care about economic growth as much as they do about equity, and why fear-mongering about the 'rich getting richer' may actually be quite misleading when viewed in context of the immense benefits that economic growth brings for everyone, including those at the bottom of the pyramid!

Watch the full video.

Episode Chapters

(00:00) Episode Highlights

(03:13) Lant's personal connect to economic growth

(04:55) GDP as a determinant of human development

(09:30) Growth and income inequality

(10:25) Are the poor really getting poorer?

(21:35) Do poor countries care more for equity than growth?

(34:15) Enabling economic growth vs targeted charity work

(36:46) Sustained economic growth - incredibly rare and easily reversed

(39:52) "Only 13 countries..."

(50:26) Why exports matter

(53:56) On exports, India is different than most other countries

(56:51) When should government listen to the industry?

(1:00:00) Exporters are 'magicians'

(1:12:30) Migration for economic growth
Show notes

(05:18) - Paper on importance of GDP for reducing child mortality https://documents1.worldbank.org/cura...

(11:36) Chile's growth incidence curve https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/po...

(13:25) Dalits in Uttar Pradesh in the market reform era https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/sites/defa...

(14:12) Factfulness by Hans Rosling https://www.amazon.in/dp/1473637465?r...

(22:03) Graph by Visual Capitalist titled "What If Everyone Lived Like These Countries?" https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-...

(22:58) Malthusian curve: Population grows exponentially and food resources linearly https://www.researchgate.net/figure/M...

(27:38) Envelopment graphs https://lantpritchett.org/economic-gr...

(30:20) "Growth is not enough" https://www.project-syndicate.org/onp...

(34:20) Development work vs charity work https://lantpritchett.org/development...

(40:05) Success stories of sustained high growth https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/s...

(1:00:00) Types of market participants framework - rentiers, powerbrokers, workhorses and magicians https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...

Subscribe to our newsletter: bit.ly/4i6NgUt

Follow FED on Twitter: https://x.com/fedev_india

Ajay Shah, economist extraordinaire and author of the finest primer on public policy in India - 'In Service of the Republic' - believes everything is everything! It's more than just the 'catchy' name of his insightful podcast with Amit Varma. Ajay explained when he joined us for our own humble endeavour - FED Dialogues - that while the phrase is borrowed from Bruce Springsteen, it speaks to a deeper philosophy held by Ajay and Amit. "The whole world adds up to something together. We wanted to give a flavour of that interconnectedness about the world". 

His conversation with FED Director Rahul Ahluwalia was a lot like that — everything! They touched on a myriad of topics, from looking at the private sector's flagging appetite for investment to categorising industrial policy into four pillars (and why he's unenthusiastic about all four) to what we can learn and what we must not learn from the China and Japan growth stories. 

Watch the full video.

Video Chapters

(00:00) - Episode Highlights

(02:20) - Ajay's personal connect with economic growth

(05:10) - What is wrong with India's growth story?

(07:50) - Too much central planning and private investment

(10:20) - Four pillars of industrial policy

(15:03) - Government placing bets with public money

(18:37) - "I just want to question the arrogance..."

(20:27) - Ethno-nationalism

(21:20) - Indian firms vs global firms

(30:04) - On Production-linked Incentives (PLI)

(39:03) - Competition with China

(43:33) - China's macroeconomic collapse

(44:00) - Rise of Xi Jinping

(59:00) - Story of Japan's growth and perils of industrial policy

(1:07:00) - South Korea's unique growth story

(1:10:00) - Why exports matter!

Subscribe to our newsletter: https://fedev.us18.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=3a4e56aeafa412e3509f7836b&id=a1c923f615

Follow FED on Twitter: https://x.com/fedev_india

LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/company/foundation-for-economic-development

Video Editor: Aditya Varier

Our guest for this episode of FED Dialogues, a private equity investor turned philanthropist, has a neat analogy for how he looks at philanthropy. He's done the ‘debt’ part of his philanthropy - set up a world-class university where he can see the impact he's creating. He's now looking at more ‘equity’ opportunities in  philanthropy. These are causes where the likelihood of success is lower, and attribution for the success, if it happens, is impossible; but where the potential ‘return’ on investments can be massive in terms of positive impact.

Ashish Dhawan is the Founder-CEO of The Convergence Foundation (TCF), whose portfolio consists of 13 mission-driven organisations, including FED, that work at the system level to move the needle on complex issues and create impact at scale. Ashish likens this high-risk philanthropy to "not playing defence, but going for the big hit. When it comes to philanthropy, my philosophy is equity 100%. Because I know, when I look at the chart over 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, 100 years, you've outperformed by a mile."

Watch the full video.

Follow FED on Twitter: https://x.com/fedev_india

Our guest for this episode has just authored one of the most highly acclaimed books on India - “Accelerating India’s Development: A State-Led Roadmap For Effective Governance”. In this fascinating one hour conversation, Karthik gives us an introduction to  the key messages of his book - the idea that the government can do more by improving the quality of its spending, or the 'pipes of public service delivery' as he calls it, instead of focusing on the share of budget spent on key sectors, and by removing the frictions that plague Indian industry and hamper productivity, rather than offering all kinds of subsidies and incentives to a few marquee investors.

He also airs his worry that the book may give the impression that he’s a statist since most chapters talk about enhancing state capacity to accelerate growth. However, in this conversation with Rahul Ahluwalia, founder-director at the Foundation for Economic Development (FED), Muralidharan explains that “by focusing on what I want the government to do, I'm sending a strong implicit message to what it should not do.”  

For more such insightful content on economic growth, follow us on Twitter. https://x.com/fedev_india