Here’s a very good video clip (just under four minutes long) on how liberalisation saved India from economic collapse, from the TV series Commanding Heights. The end of the Soviet Union reverberated, it says, and took away India’s role model. Manmohan Singh, India’s finance minister who introduced the market reforms, says in the video that the USSR’s collapse was the final proof needed to show that a protectionist, centrally planned economy is no way to run an economy. “In 1991,” the presenter says, “India stared bankruptcy in the face”. So ignoring the advice of Western aid campaigners, they pursued a free market agenda and the rest, as they say, is history.