In the midst of the now familiar chorus hailing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for Make in India, Arun Shourie pitched in with a discordant note. The reflex catcalls branding him a fair weather friend may have come immediately. But they did little to assuage the feeling that Team Modi may be letting the economy drift into ominous weather.

It has been usual to signpost India’s economic history into the pre- and post-reforms phase with 1991 marking the watershed. However, in the midst of all the reformist drumbeats accompanying Modi’s Make in India, it would not be out of place to remind readers of the all too familiar import-substitution regime that carried well into the 1970s, gaining notoriety for vintage Make in India rules and regulations that continue to be the hallmark of our system of governance to this day.

Much that lingers in our systems can be traced back to the glory days of that Be Indian Buy Indian dream, that spawned a state-led manufacturing and industrialisation drive where controls, licences and sectoral reservations became the instruments for nurturing indigenous manufacturing capabilities to generate employment.

The approach ended up giving unfettered economic and political clout to the myriad and ever expanding army of agents and agencies of the government. Bureaucracies, inspectors, regulators and their ilk proliferated. Such a system once devised could only seek to serve itself, to reinforce and perpetuate norms, rules and patterns that armed it to exercise power and control.

Thus was born the political discourse that made the goings on in Shastri Bhawan and Raisina Hill central to the fate of India Inc. This was not only a minefield, but was in fact the minefield in which the scaffolding of the 1991 reforms was laid. No wonder it has remained the primary weakness of India’s reforms saga.

The reforms of 1991 sprang not from any major ideological, institutional or even attitudinal shift. What the country witnessed was a series of back-to-the-wall measures prompted by conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund, as it forced the government of the day into economic liberalisation. However, implementation remained with agencies deeply wedded to the interventionist policies of the pre-reform era.

As such the process was bound to be patchy. The easiest pieces of the jigsaw fell into place first. The trickier ones were either ignored, or the can kicked down the road.

The problems of the power sector were identified as one of capacity — easily solved by getting private entities to set up power plants. However, getting the private sector into generation was the easier part. The challenge was in carrying the process through to its logical conclusion downstream to the consumer end. But distribution as well as retailing reforms remain a political football to this day.

In sector after sector, the country witnessed something similar. With the award of licences, their monitoring and control being the core competency of the administrative machinery, it is hardly surprising that the so-called public private partnerships fostered by lending institutions soon metamorphosed into a licence grab. So systems, or rather the lack of them, came to be instituted for awarding coal blocks, airports, power plants, spectrum and so on.

Little wonder that these awards came to be questioned by the Supreme Court; the rest of course is history. Even as overt policy objectives stress delicensing, the fine print continues to introduce controls through pricing, testing requirements, myriad clearances and a zillion petty and not so petty quasi-regulatory demands.

No wonder India continues to rank a dismal 142nd on the Ease of Doing Business Index. Governance structures remain wedded to licensing, regulation and control, rather than growth, programme management and true market liberalisation.

Today many are ready to write obituaries of the PPP model — which, given the state’s incapacity to fund public infrastructure, was expected to deliver 21st century infrastructure, roads, ports, railroads, airports, power plants to the country. The truth is that the PPP models implemented were never genuine partnerships but grafts.

As an example, we have just seen the conclusion of the first coal block auctions. We have heard the government pat itself on the back for devising a system that not only gifts largesse of Rs 1 lakh crore to coal rich states, but also ends up reducing power tariffs to the extent of another Rs 30,000 crore. Who said there are no free lunches? Or was this round purely the result of stranded end users desperately clutching at straws to buy whatever insurance they could for threatened assets? Ditto for spectrum.

True reforms in the coal sector cannot happen unless one stops treating the coal sector as a mere adjunct to user industries like power, steel and cement. Coal is a technology driven industry in its own right. A true reform vision would need hard work to institute long term policies that firmly establish vibrant coal markets in the country — not captive to the patronage of quotas and allocations.

To conclude, it is time to pause to remind Prime Minister Modi of his campaign promise “minimum government, maximum governance”. I believe i am not alone in suspecting this is one promise being heard less and less of each passing day.

The writer is director of Observer Research Foundation