Industry and Services in Growth and Structural Change in India: Some Unexplored Features

This paper briefly presents an analytical description of the twin processes of growth of output and change in its composition in the Indian economy since independence, by looking at the time-paths of the two dimensions simultaneously. It suggests that three turning points located respectively in the mid-1960s, 1980, and the mid-1990s separate the entire period after independence into four sequential phases of growth and structural change. This periodization of India’s postindependence economic history points towards the need to go beyond relating the dynamics of the Indian economy to exclusively the degree to which the prevalent economic policy regime was interventionist or liberal in different periods.