India gained independence in 1947. From that year until the early 1990s, successive governments adopted inward-oriented development strategies with the state assuming a dominant role in the economy via state planning. Market forces were not permitted to play a major role in resource allocation. In the wake of a 1991 balance-of-payments crisis, India set in train a series of stabilisation-cum-structural adjustment measures with far-reaching effects. Their central objective was to reintegrate the Indian economy with the world economy by reducing barriers to trade and investment, and deregulation of a highly bureaucratised economy. The promotion of FDI was also seen as a way of reducing the country’s dependence on debt-creating capital inflows, while at the same time renovating Indian industry’s archaic technologies and easing its entry into international markets.