Conclusion

Globalisation, pursued through the policies of liberalisation and privatisation, has produced both positive and negative results — for India and for other countries alike — and views on it remain sharply divided.

Supporters see globalisation as an opportunity. It offers greater access to global markets and to high technology, and it opens up the possibility for large industries of developing countries to become significant players on the international stage.

Critics take the opposite view. To them, globalisation is a strategy by which developed countries expand their markets into other nations, at the cost of the welfare and identity of people in poorer countries. They argue that market-driven globalisation has widened the economic gaps between nations and between people.

Seen from India's own experience, some studies argue that the crisis of the early 1990s was fundamentally the product of deep-rooted inequalities in Indian society, and that the reform package adopted in response — shaped by externally advised policy — went on to deepen those inequalities further. It has, they say, raised the incomes and the quality of consumption mainly of high-income groups, and the growth has clustered in a few areas of the service sector — telecommunication, information technology, finance, entertainment, travel and hospitality, real estate and trade — rather than in vital sectors like agriculture and industry, which provide livelihoods to millions of people.