From being the staid Hindu ritual, the growth rate of the Indian economy has taken a more secular and athletic turn ? by becoming something of a football. For decades, with all of the marvellous machinery of input-output matrices and planning, of high officials issuing manifold edicts of control, subtle and not so subtle, all we got was the so-called Hindu rate of growth, something adamantly in the region of 3.5 per cent per annum. With the experts bogged down in a quagmire of ever-expanding volumes of paper, the politicians abandoned the seemingly thankless business of trying to push economic growth. Like nature, politics abhors a vacuum and there seemed many other attractive avenues to pursue. Much dragon teeth were sown in this period ? divisive, sectarian, entitlement ? the many faces of the politics of victim-hood. The pure fruit of these labours are, of course, incarnated in today?s Bihar. Lesser forms are spread across the country but they do happen to obtain in much greater, sometimes toxic, concentration in the northern and eastern states.

As India liberalised, the nineties saw the growth rate take wing. And unlike the eighties that too had growth significantly above the so-called Hindu rate, the nineties boom was not powered by the self-limiting fuel of fiscal extravagance. The nineties boom lasted three years (1994-95 to 1996-97), with average growth of 7.5 per cent, with industry and services (non-agriculture) growing at 8.8 per cent, and industry alone averaging 9.6 per cent.

In capitalism, booms are followed by an anti-boom, or bust if you would like to call it. Over the next six years (1997-98 to 2002-03) economic growth averaged 5.2 per cent, with agriculture doing 0.9 per cent and non-agriculture 6.8 per cent. Pretty good for a bust, unless you would like to argue that the spendthrift behaviour given effect to by the Fifth Pay Commission created some additional spending and hence some growth. But one would submit that in this period not only was private corporate investment subdued, but the additional salary-spending burden on government meant a diminution of public investment as well. On a net basis, the higher salary bill was probably entirely offset by curtailment of public investment and hence at the expense of growth. In 1999-00 and 2000-01, there were signs of some recovery but it did not have adequate traction and fizzled out. Partly because of the downturn of the world economy in this period perhaps, but certainly also due to insufficient development of conducive policy conditions on the home turf.

The economic bounce in 2003-04 that has got the government singing aloud actually began in 2002-03. Industry grew by 6.4 per cent and services by 7.1 per cent ? together the non-agriculture sector expanded by 6.9 per cent. Non-food credit flows from the banking system took off, particularly since June 2002 and swelled over the year. Exports started picking up from July 2002 (up 29 per cent) and imports from September (up 30 per cent) onwards. Recovery was on the road. But there were factors that successfully obfuscated the issue. One was the terrible climate fomented by the heightening of tensions with Pakistan and nuclear talk on the one hand and the riots in Gujarat on the other. Second, the bad monsoon and the forecast of huge estimated declines in output ? estimates that have waxed fatter as evidence of a catastrophe of such an order has got thinner. In any event in June and July 2002, the atmosphere was heavy with prospects of war and of its consequences, even if the drought and hoarse yelling from the self-appointed spoke persons of farmers did not carry too much credibility.

So, the economic recovery that was underway even as the international media cast the pall of a mushroom cloud on the sub-continent in the hot summer of 2002, got to be noticed only a year later: And promptly and absolutely wrongly yoked to the excellent monsoon of 2003. Perhaps another of those ancient agrarian habits of yoking a pair of bullocks to the plough ? the electoral symbol of the Congress in their halcyon years. Just as the bad harvest of 2002-03 did not choke off the recovery of India?s modern sectors, the good harvest of 2003-04 did little to hasten it on its way, at best providing some icing on the cake. Of course, that the collective concern of policymakers, regulators, representatives of the people (or more often of groups with identities that derive solely as not being some other group) did not work the miracle of killing the recovery in its tracks is no doubt a great mercy.

But now thankfully policymakers seem prepared to take the ball and run. Not just in the ruling coalition in the Centre, but also in the Opposition. Both are promising high growth, which get translated into the hyperbolic language of election-time as 10 per cent or higher. The growth rate business has transmogrified ? from the mantra of archaic ritual to the symbol of modern-day aspiration ? football. In the language of sports, sorry entertainment, hyperbole is the grammar, and speed, athleticism, and agility is the substance. So yes, for practitioners of the dismal science, even in its more optimistic modern-day shades, talk of 10 per cent by policy makers, and even more so of 15 per cent, even 25 per cent, by management gurus and corporate leaders, is particularly galling.

But that is indeed the trade-off. It serves little purpose to point out that, well any rate of growth is possible if every adjustment of output increase is matched by a corresponding adjustment in every other connected activity ? all in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately for us mortals, such feats of magic are not possible. Hence, in the real world it takes time for the inter-connected system to grow, co-ordination across time is not painless, inflation is a consequence, and roads take time to build, as do factories and children take even longer to educate and grow up. All of this is true and will remain true. But it certainly helps when economic outcomes seize the imagery of politician and businessperson alike, in the symbols of contemporaneous mass pastime and achievement. The excitement and the spirit of ?all is possible?, is a far better condition to work with, than the traditional reluctance and cynicism, whose only sanctity is the cobweb of habit.

The author is economic advisor to ICRA (Investment Information and Credit Rating Agency)