Free NonAlignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the 21st Century by Sunil Khilnani Page A

neighbourhood. This will need a concerted push towards increasing mobility of goods, services, capital and labour needs vis-à-vis the countries of South Asia, East Africa, West Asia and South-East Asia: all of which are well positioned to dramatically expand their economic engagement with India. Within modest time horizons, it should be possible to enlarge measures of integration with these countries by ten times, on all four dimensions (goods, services, capital and labour).
    All these areas will require institutional collaboration and redesign. Our government, political and business elites still tend to think of the international economy in terms of discrete issue areas of concern to each of them. That fragmented picture must be abandoned, in favour of one that views our international economic engagements as a unified and coherent project—embodying sharedinterests and with clear linkages back into the domestic economy and electoral considerations. Can we leverage bargains from one sector to the other? Do we possess the institutional mechanisms to do so? There already exist many government institutions that should ideally address these questions (within the Ministry of External Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Commerce, Reserve Bank of India, etc.). However, lateral communication between these institutions is too often blocked and insufficient. Appropriate intergovernmental communication must be enhanced, while avoiding bureaucratic creep: effective coordinating mechanisms between various actors would be a first step.
    Second, there is a major shortage of systemic, continuous data collection activities which should provide the empirical basis for strategic decisions. Such activities need to be started immediately—perhaps with the help of India’s burgeoning knowledge-processing industry. In this vein, given rapid developments in information collection and processing technologies, there will need to be regular reassessment of what activities are best allocated to the public and private sectors respectively. Bureaucratically entrenched data and analysis systems are no longer adequate to our current and coming strategic requirements concerning the economy.
    Third, the form of interaction between the public and private sector needs fundamental change. Generally speaking, the government and Indian businesses seem to have a fairly instrumental relationship, with each side conversing with the other only in times of crisis or need. What is needed is a sustained, collaborative dialogue, where trust can be built and both sides can develop realistic notions of what they can and cannot expect from the other. Such a relationship would greatly augment the strategic coordination possible between government and business, both internationally and domestically. Greater continuous communication on economic issues between government and the business community should in turn be transparent to the media, so that public opinion can be carried along in creating a national consensus on our strategic economic interests.
    India must have a coherent vision of the global economy and its position within it, combined with a concrete set of actions for its interactions in various international institutions which are part of the global economic order. This includes not only the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, but also international standards organizations like the Basel agreements, accounting standards, G-20, etc. While it may not be necessary to take an aggressive stance in everyorganization or institution, the scenario building and consideration of strategic options seem to be severely lacking (as is evidenced, for instance, by India’s role in such processes as appointments of IMF chiefs). In each of these international engagements, India needs to boost the intellectual capacity within the country which would identify India’s interests on an array of issues and help the government strategize mechanisms through which