‘No man can stop an idea where time has come’-Victor Hugo narrated by Manmohan Singh.
These were the words of Manmohan Singh when the Permit Raj had just got India into a big crisis in which India had only enough money to survive for two weeks. This all started with the Permit Raj leading to corruption. So, the License Raj stretched from 1947 to 1991. The permit raj in India was vision by Jawaharlal Lal Nehru inspired by the Soviet Union. This was followed by five year plans. This plan was started after cancelling a revolutionary plan called ‘THE BOMBAY PLAN’ which was drafted by the Tata and Birla Group. The reason for cancelling this was that the rich were getting richer and poor were getting poorer. So, in this plan, to start a company, a person had to get a lot of licenses. In the beginning t this seemed successful but later when big companies like Infosys AND Hindustan Motors were refused licenses, they started to bribe people and corruption become bigger and bigger. This led India to the crisis. And we had only enough money to survive for two weeks. This is when the two big heroes P.V. Narsihma Rao and Manmohan Singh came and handled the situation. They went to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and took a loan. Through there were some conditions to be followed, two of them were to reduce the value of the rupee and second to reduce the number of licenses.
Now, ask yourself some questions. If Mr. Jawaharlal Lal Nehru hadn’t stopped The Bombay Plan, would we ever be in crisis situation? If Bombay Plan was allowed to go through, would the poor people have survived? If P.V Narsihma Rao and Manmohan Singh weren’t there, would India have been the seventh largest economy in the world? If the IMF hadn’t reduced the value of rupee, would one dollar still be equal to 71.90 rupees. Hence, I believe that if ‘THE BOMBAY PLAN’ was cancelled and Jawaharlal Lal Nehru hadn’t gone to USSR that year, we wouldn’t have been in that crisis and value of rupee wouldn’t have gone down and we would have been a richer nation.