Wealth & Money Quote by Manmohan Singh

Manmohan Singh is doing two things at once: reassuring India’s skeptics at home while translating India to an impatient global audience. The line sounds technocratic, almost mild, but it’s a carefully calibrated defense of the 1990s liberalization project he helped architect. Calling India “always” a mixed economy isn’t a history lesson so much as political insulation. If reform can be framed as continuity rather than rupture, it becomes harder to paint market opening as ideological betrayal.

The pivot phrase is “by Western standards.” Singh isn’t simply benchmarking; he’s negotiating credibility. To Western investors, “mixed economy” can read as code for bureaucracy, state monopolies, and policy caprice. So he flips the script: measured against the West’s own categories, India is “much more” market-oriented than the caricature suggests. That comparative move also smuggles in a critique of Western simplifications, where anything less than privatized-and-deregulated gets filed under “state-driven.”

The subtext is a balancing act between sovereignty and integration. Singh signals that markets are not an imported faith but a practical instrument already embedded in India’s system, even with a large public sector. It’s reform without surrender: India can invite capital, competition, and growth while keeping the state’s developmental role legitimate. The sentence’s restrained confidence is itself the message - incremental, pragmatic, and meant to calm fears on both sides of the border and the aisle.