Language | English |
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ISBN-10 | 0670999520 |
ISBN-13 | 9780670999521 |
No of pages | 261 |
Font Size | Medium |
Book Publisher | Penguin India |
Published Date | 01 Jun 2007 |
Yashwant Sinha is a veteran politician and a former administrator. He is credited with preparing the blueprint for the 1991 economic reforms of India as part of the Union Budget.
Sinha taught political science at the University of Patna till 1960 before he joined the Indian Administrative Services.
In 1984, he resigned from the services and joined politics as a member of the Janata Party. He worked as the Minister of Finance from November 1990 to June 1991 in Chandra Shekhar's cabinet.
He later joined the BJP and became the national spokesperson in 1996. He served as the Union Minister of Finance (1998-2002) and External Affairs (2002-2004).
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The Chandra Shekhar government had fallen. Fresh elections had been called. Yashwant Sinha, finance minister in the caretaker government, was in Patna, contesting for the Lok Sabha against tough opposition, when a senior officer from the finance ministry brought an urgent file for his signature: India needed to mortgage gold to obtain a loan from the Bank of England to tide over a payments crisis??"there were just enough foreign exchange reserves to pay for two weeks' imports.
The crisis was not of their government's making, but it devolved on Sinha to take this drastic step. If he ever got the opportunity, he promised himself, he would make sure that the country never had to face such a crisis again. The opportunity came in 1998, when Sinha was appointed finance minister in the NDA government led by Vajpayee and was faced with yet another crisis: the nuclear tests in May that year resulted in sanctions and a possible flashpoint.
The finance minister's decision to issue the Resurgent India Bonds helped tide over it, raising 4.25 billion in two weeks from NRIs, and the country hasn't looked back since. Yashwant Sinha was finance minister for four years, until 2002, and presented five budgets. In Confessions of a Swadeshi Reformer he gives us the inside story of how the framework for the growth that has taken place subsequently was laid in that time.
From the reforms that were initiated to the politics that threatened all initiative, the opposition from within the party as also outside it, which tried to derail the process, Sinha pulls no punches in this candid memoir. Nor does he shy away from discussing the attempts to cut him down to size, including the proposal to split up the Ministry of Finance, and the various controversies of the time??"from the two UTI scams to the Flex Industries case and the Mauritius tax treaty case (in which he was alleged to have favoured his daughter-in-law), all of which he faced with equanimity and strength of character. There are, b