Forbes India 16th Anniversary Special: How to tame your own disruption
For Forbes India's 16th anniversary, we have put together a constellation of top thinkers, experts, academics, and businesspeople to tell you how to make the best of a good crisis. It is 16 years since Forbes India started to publish, and we wanted to make this an insightful sixteen for you (sweet is so passe)
As a nation, we are no stranger to shocks. Since 1991 alone—the year the economic reforms began—we have faced a few big ones.
The East Asia Currency crisis of 1997 somehow got combined with sanctions on India in the aftermath of the nuclear test at Pokhran in 1998. As business journalists active at that time would recall, the term “gloom and doom” was often bandied about back then. But the gloom lifted when the doom appeared to be a non-possibility. As it turned out, some of India’s slowness in fully opening up its economy and financial sector helped. We benefited from continued restrictions on the capital account, stable fundamentals and rising foreign exchange reserves.
The dotcom bust of 2000 unspooled the dream scripts of several technology companies around the world. Many folded. Joblessness in the Silicon Valley became commonplace. But the biggest tech names in India at that time were basking in the glow of the Y2K disruption and making the most hay possible. It was not high-end work, but it was stable and remunerative.
The global financial crisis of 2007-08 ravaged us in many ways, but the Reserve Bank rode the crisis admirably, with a series of reductions in interest rates and adroit management all around. And, lest we should forget, all of us suffered deep losses one way or the other when the great pandemic visited us. The losses are too many and too grim to recount.
Yet, as A K Bhattacharya (AKB to every journalist in town), who chews macroeconomic numbers for breakfast, tells us, these crises arose from well-defined causes and, therefore, were predictable. Our responses to them, too, were conventional.
