Wealth & Money Quote by Manmohan Singh

Manmohan Singh’s line reads like a polite demolition charge placed under the comforting myth of self-reliance. He isn’t merely praising “openness”; he’s diagnosing what insulation does to a political economy: it turns protection into permission to stagnate. The key word is “incentive,” a term that smuggles in a whole theory of human behavior without sounding doctrinaire. Singh frames productivity and innovation not as patriotic virtues but as outcomes that require pressure, comparison, and the risk of being outdone.

The phrase “rigidly controlled economy” evokes India’s pre-1991 License Raj without naming it, a diplomatic restraint that doubles as critique. “Infinite protection” is deliberate exaggeration, rhetorically useful because it exposes protectionism’s slippery slope: once an industry is sheltered, it always has a reason to stay sheltered. The subtext is aimed as much at domestic power brokers as at abstract policy. Protected sectors don’t just lose the will to compete; they gain the leverage to lobby for continued protection, making inefficiency politically self-reinforcing.

Context sharpens the intent. Singh, as finance minister during liberalization and later prime minister, is speaking from lived governance, not seminar theory. His argument is essentially moral in its consequences: a closed system doesn’t just misallocate resources; it misallocates ambition. By tying “new ideas” to exposure, he reframes globalization as a discipline mechanism - one that forces institutions to earn their survival rather than negotiate it.