We Also Make Policy: An Insider’s Account of How the Finance Ministry Functions

by Subhash Chandra Garg

English 1 edition

Economic policy has a direct impact on how people live, eat, work and spend. It governs every aspect of life, and finance secretaries are central to how economic policy is made and implemented. In this book, Subhash Chandra Garg, former economic affairs secretary and finance secretary, tells the inside story of how economic policy is made, and unmade, at the highest levels in the Government of India. We Also Make Policy is a fly-on-the-wall account of proceedings within the finance ministry. The book talks candidly about controversial decisions from the first tenure of the NDA government, such as the politics of ‘minimum support price’ to farmers, electoral bonds, recapitalizing of banks, monetizing national assets and the controversial resignation of RBI Governor Urjit Patel, among others. As the author of three Union Budgets, Garg also talks about what it takes to put the Budget together: the pressures, the processes, the calculations and, above all, the politics.