Narrator: In 2001, just as the dust was settling from the 9/11 attacks in New York, Goldman Sachs economist Jim O'Neill was looking for the next big thing. He saw a world shifting its focus and identified four emerging economies poised to dominate global growth: Brazil, Russia, China, and India. He coined an acronym that would define an era: BRIC. For a decade, the BRIC nations soared, lifting millions from poverty. But by 2013, O'Neill was singing a different tune. "India," he declared, "was the biggest disappointment." After a massive power failure plunged northern India into darkness, he wrote a frustrated note to investors asking, "What is the matter with you guys?"

This question—what is the matter with India?—lies at the heart of Mihir S. Sharma's critical analysis, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy. The book dissects the years of promise, the subsequent slowdown, and the deep-seated structural problems that have held the nation back. It argues that India's path to prosperity is blocked by a series of bad choices, half-hearted reforms, and a dangerous tendency to celebrate stopgap solutions as brilliant innovations.

Narrator: The story of India's modern economy begins in 1991, a year of crisis. Facing bankruptcy, the government, led by Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, initiated a series of bold reforms. But as Sharma reveals, these reforms were crippled from the start by political timidity, setting a dangerous precedent for decades to come.

A key moment was the battle over fertilizer subsidies. To curb government overspending, Singh proposed a 40% price hike on fertilizers. The economic rationale was clear, but the political backlash was immediate and fierce. Farmers' organizations protested, and members of Singh's own party threatened to resign. Instead of holding firm and explaining the necessity of the reform, Prime Minister Rao buckled. He instructed Singh to roll back the price hike, offering a compromise: a smaller 30% increase that exempted "small and marginal farmers."

This decision became what Sharma calls Indian reform's "original, stinking sin." It created a massive loophole that wealthy farmers immediately exploited, using false names to buy subsidized fertilizer. More importantly, it established a pattern of reform by stealth and apology. It taught a generation of politicians that good economics was bad politics, and that tough decisions should always be softened with populist compromises. This half-heartedness meant that while India opened its product markets, it never truly reformed the markets for land, labor, and capital. The 1991 reforms stopped halfway, leaving a legacy of unresolved problems that continue to plague the economy.

Narrator: In the years following the 1991 reforms, a powerful and convenient narrative took hold: India had cleverly leapfrogged the messy industrial stage of development and was building a modern economy on the back of its booming IT and services sectors. Sharma argues this was a dangerous myth, a way to rationalize a colossal failure. The truth, he contends, is that India simply can't make things.

The sectors that thrived, like IT and telecom, did so not because of brilliant government policy, but often because of government inaction. They were new industries that grew so fast that the old regulatory state couldn't keep up. Meanwhile, manufacturing, the one sector capable of creating millions of jobs for India's burgeoning youth, was left to wither.

Sharma illustrates this with the story of a hypothetical tech entrepreneur in the 1990s who dreams of building a graphics card factory in India. His dream is crushed by a thousand cuts: the rupee's devaluation makes imported parts expensive, acquiring land is a nightmare, the power supply is unreliable, and he's hounded by corrupt inspectors demanding bribes. His products are damaged on potholed roads and delayed at the port. He eventually gives up. This story, Sharma argues, is the story of Indian manufacturing in miniature. The country has failed to create an environment where industry can thrive, instead choosing to sell the absence of a manufacturing sector as a brilliant innovation.

Narrator: As India's economy slowed after its "seven years of plenty" from 2004 to 2011, a new term entered the lexicon: "policy paralysis." But Sharma argues this is a misnomer. The problem wasn't a lack of new policies; it was administrative paralysis, born from a debilitating fear of being accused of corruption. This fear, in turn, fueled the very crony capitalism it was meant to prevent.

The case of Vijay Mallya and Kingfisher Airlines serves as a perfect example. Mallya, a flamboyant tycoon, launched his airline with grand ambitions but a flawed business model. When the airline was clearly failing, he didn't go bankrupt. Instead, he used his political connections to secure massive loans from public-sector banks. These state-owned banks, staffed by bureaucrats terrified of making a wrong move, continued to pour taxpayer money into a failing enterprise, believing Mallya was too connected to fail.

Kingfisher eventually collapsed, leaving behind thousands of crores in bad debt. Sharma argues Mallya's case is not unique but a symptom of a larger disease. State-controlled banks have become taps for India's crony capitalists, leading to a system where the "survival of the fattest" is the rule. The fear of corruption makes bureaucrats unwilling to make decisions, while the politically connected exploit this paralysis to secure resources, creating a vicious cycle of inefficiency and waste.

Narrator: India often celebrates "jugaad," or frugal innovation, as a sign of its inherent ingenuity. Sharma dismantles this idea, calling it a curse. He argues that what passes for innovation is often just corner-cutting, a "make-do" approach that prioritizes low costs over quality, safety, and genuine technological advancement. This mindset has permeated the Indian private sector, leading to a low-cost, low-quality, low-innovation equilibrium.

Nowhere was this more shockingly apparent than in the Ranbaxy scandal. Ranbaxy Labs was once the pride of India's pharmaceutical industry, a generic drug maker celebrated for providing affordable medicines. In 2008, Japanese firm Daiichi Sankyo bought a majority stake for $4.6 billion, believing it was acquiring a world-class company. What they discovered was a "culture corrupt to the core." An internal investigation revealed that Ranbaxy had been falsifying test records for years, selling ineffective or unsafe drugs, and lying to regulators. One executive was even quoted as saying, "Who cares? It’s just blacks dying," in reference to the company's ineffective AIDS drugs in Africa.

Daiichi Sankyo eventually sold what was left of Ranbaxy for a massive loss. The scandal shattered the myth of Indian corporate integrity and revealed a deep-seated problem. It showed that the "jugaad" mindset, when applied without an ethical compass, leads not to innovation, but to dangerous and deceptive practices that tarnish the country's reputation.

Narrator: So, what is the way forward? Sharma argues that India must abandon its patchwork, piecemeal approach to reform. Instead of creating small, isolated Special Economic Zones, it must turn the whole country into one. This requires five great strides, but they all boil down to one core principle: trust prices, and trust people.

The government's deep-seated distrust of market prices has led to disastrous policies. Consider Mumbai's commuter trains, the cheapest form of transport in the world. Fares are kept so artificially low that the system is starved of funds, leading to "Super-Dense Crushloads" where 16 people are packed into a single square meter and hundreds die falling from trains each year. The government fears a political backlash from raising fares, but Sharma argues people are willing to pay more for better, safer services. The problem isn't that people won't pay; it's that the government insists on providing a terrible service for free, a subsidy that disproportionately benefits the non-poor anyway.

This distrust extends to energy, land, and labor. By subsidizing inputs and controlling prices, the government creates massive inefficiencies and corruption. The solution, Sharma insists, is to let prices work. Sell natural resources at auction. Allow farmers to sell their land on an open market. Let people pay for the electricity and transport they use. A government that trusts prices is a government that trusts its people to make their own choices.

Narrator: Ultimately, Restart is a call for a fundamental shift in the Indian state's mindset. For too long, it has acted as a paternalistic, controlling entity—the mai-baap or "mother-father" state—that believes it knows best. This has created a system of half-measures, cronyism, and inefficiency. The book's most important takeaway is that this must end. The government must stop trying to pick winners, stop subsidizing failure, and stop protecting the interests of the powerful at the expense of the many.

The path forward requires radical, and at times painful, reform. It means trusting the signals that democracy sends, even when they are inconvenient. It means building a state that empowers its citizens instead of controlling them. The noise of building a new India—the protests, the debates, the disruption—may be loud and chaotic. But as Sharma concludes, that noise is not the sound of a system breaking down. It is the sound of growth, the sound of a nation finally, hopefully, mending itself.