Time & Perspective Quote by Manmohan Singh

Singh’s line is doing two jobs at once: arguing for a tool of development, and preemptively narrowing the moral debate about it. By anchoring his claim in “the economic history of the last 150 years,” he borrows the authority of inevitability. This isn’t ideology, he implies, but a reading of the record. The specificity of “20 years” matters too. It frames industrialization as an emergency timetable, the kind that justifies extraordinary measures. When you tell an audience the clock is ticking, you make trade-offs feel responsible rather than coercive.

The key phrase is the conditional: “if you don’t have a well-developed private sector, entrepreneurial class.” Singh is naming a structural absence that postcolonial states often confronted: capital is thin, institutions are young, and markets can’t conjure supply chains on command. Central planning, in this framing, becomes less a Soviet fantasy than a bridge over missing social infrastructure. The subtext is pragmatic and faintly defensive: India’s early planning era wasn’t naive; it was a workaround for weakness.

Context sharpens the intent. As a technocrat-statesman associated with India’s later liberalization, Singh isn’t romanticizing the state. He’s drawing a boundary around when planning is “important” and when it becomes a drag. It’s also a political maneuver: concede planning’s historical necessity while making room for markets once the entrepreneurial class exists. The quote works because it turns a polarizing argument (state vs. market) into a sequencing problem, and in doing so, recasts legitimacy as timing.