The ‘big bang’ reforms announced by the Centre on Friday — approval of foreign direct investment (FDI) in retail, civil aviation, power exchanges, broadcasting etc — should not have been “big bang” in the first place. It is nobody’s argument that the current UPA government has been under tremendous pressure for its “policy paralysis”; a three-year period when the government could not introduce any significant reform that would boost the confidence of international investors in India or even help the domestic industry.

The timing of the reform announcements — when the Prime Minister finds himself at the centre of a coal blocks allocation scam — could be suspect. Nevertheless, in the context of falling economic growth rates, these reforms are unequivocally welcome. The government has been prudent enough to let state governments decide on the implementation of the retail FDI. This would achieve two purposes — one; states that implement the new rule could see themselves (theoretically, at least) receiving big-ticket investments from global retail chains such as Walmart of the US, Carrefour of France, Tesco of Britain, etc.