What do reforms mean for India of 2011? Top of the list would be reconciling environment concerns with the demands for industrial growth; ensuring state and industry pay a fair price for resources and finally ensuring the poorest 10% of our people get food at affordable rates, those just above them get health care and the rest access to decent education.

None of these, except the food bit, figured anywhere in our list of must-dos in 1991. They did not figure even in 2001.

This is the finest endorsement of the 20 years of the Indian reform story. Our reforms then have made it possible now to create an absolutely fresh menu of choices, which were simply unthinkable even a decade ago.

So, the challenges of today and this decade are the children of the reforms, unleashed from 1991 onwards. They would not have stared us in the face, unless we had managed to clean up the earlier litter from most sectors.

It is therefore puerile for informed commentators like Yashwant Sinha to compare any of the economic indicators now with the cataclysmic year of 1991. Without the context of what we have achieved since then, the plain vanilla comparisons of the numbers do not make sense.

Critics who do not understand this sequencing of reforms miss out on the richness of the reform package of the past 20 years. Sure India still has 93% of its labour force employed in the unorganised sector, or that health indicators lag every middle-income country in the HDI list. But those are opportunities to avail of than limitations that restrict.

Because Manmohan Singh in 1991 made the choice of going for trade and industrial reforms, for instance, the benefits flowing from those have made it possible for him to go hell for leather on agricultural reforms now. The plate of opportunities is now overflowing with options.

The problem is that neither Singh nor Mukherjee seems to be grasping those opportunities now, at least at the speed at which they need to be taken. Procastination won?t help resolve the issues. Instead it would show up as missed opportunities. To put it in Vijay Kelkar?s words, we run the risk of growing old as a nation before we become rich, if opportunities like the demographic dividend are wasted. The best part of the dividend will have run a large part of its course by the end of this decade.

It is fairly certain that finance minister Pranab Mukherjee would refer to these priorities in his Budget speech on Monday. But that is not the same as offering workable solutions. The problem with the UPA government is that it has already front-loaded all its expenditure plans for the next three years and Mukherjee can only tinker at the edges. In terms of reforms, the big one the UPA government needs to do must be in food management, to answer the crowd in front of the Parliament House on Wednesday. But those are squarely in the control of the state governments.

One of the options the government seems to have successfully opened is on delivery of its services to those who really need it. The best way to shorten the crowd before the Parliament House is to bring the bottom 10% an assured food supply. This requires, as Nandan Nilekani says, re-engineering of public service delivery to handle on-demand, high volume, low-cost, consistent quality transactions of various kinds. Obviously, a large part of that work will have to be technologically driven, which Nilekani and his gang are up to.

For instance, if the impact of inflation has to be moderated on the poor then, besides supply-side management, programmes such as NREGA and national rural health mission have to be seen as effective safety nets for the poor.

Reform critics have always held up this mirror to say the reforms have not delivered. Their criticism is of the quality of outcome from the Budget. As of now, the government monitors it by sending out questionnaire to all the ministries. Those are very detailed but mean practically nothing. Since the finance ministry cannot discriminate between ministries, it asks both information & broadcasting as well as tribal affairs to list how the money apportioned has impacted employment generation. Some of the ministries have apparently given very interesting answers to the queries, with copies marked to all concerned.

Yet this counts. The last few years have seen significant investment and resource allocation in a broad array of programmes for social protection like jobs, pensions and food as well as social advancement, involving millions of people interacting with the state at a large number of touch points, says Nilekani. Unless these are monitored effectively, the questions about reforms will only mount.

Just like old economy sectors that fail to excite imagination, there are old economy reforms like disinvestment and one would even say stuff like banking reforms that the government can safely take on now. Beyond the Parliament chambers, very few of the crowd milling outside will even care. The new voters in rural and urban India are not swayed by bogeys of private and public sector to even notice. They want to know about banking correspondent as it touches them, they want to know about jobs which means education and urban reforms. They also want to know whether the price environment is paying for industrial development. These, in short, are the new economy challenges.

These never assumed any significant scale for the government in the first two decades in any big way. But if the finance minister has to have any hope in hell to make the large majority of Indians believe in the reform story, he has to read from an entirely new script.

subhomoy.bhattacharjee@expressindia.com