Our glorious past beckons.

"The middle class is often viewed as being squeezed between the wealthy, who own a disproportionately large share of the nation's assets, and the poor who can fall back on government aid," wrote Sanket Mohapatra. But they have not suffered from the coronavirus-induced lockdown, he suggests. The biggest disappointment for the middle class is that it does not receive any services for the taxes it pays. The National Health Service in Britain provides free medical care to every patient. Denmark has very high taxes but provides a wide range of services which means a very high standard of living for citizens. The aspirational middle class gets government benefits and the affluent middle class may have seen a rise in wealth with the stock market index the Sensex soaring to over 50,000 on 21 January, although it closed lower the next day on profit taking. The middle middle class has not seen a drop in earnings but the gig economy is a threat to its existence, says Mohapatra. This ignores the fact that the number of white collar professionals has dropped from 18.8 million during May-August 2019 to 18.1 million during January to April 2020 and then to a shocking 12.2 million during May to August 2020. This year is the 30th anniversary of the balance of payments crisis of 1991 when India had to transfer 47 tons of its gold reserves to the Bank of England and 20 tons to the Union Bank of Switzerland as collateral to borrow foreign currency to pay for imports. Before 1991, India suffered from 'Licence Raj' which "refers to the control that the government had over business in India. "Government bureaucrats decided what businesses could produce and how much they could produce," wrote Vivek Kaul. Ambassador and Premier Padmini cars do not exist now. "In 1980, India had around 2.5 million landline phones, all concentrated in cities. By October 2020, mobile phone connections had touched 1.15 billion." "The number of passenger cars sold in 1991-92 was around 150,000 units. In FY2020, 1.7 million units were sold." To put it in perspective, China sold 25.3 million cars in 2020, down 1.9% from 2019. In 1991, most Indians could access only government-owned Doordarshan (DD) channel on TV, those living in cities could also access DD Metro. The crisis in 1991 forced the government of Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao to institute economic reforms which led to the per capita national income increasing from Rs 29,686 to Rs 109,000 in 2019-20. Unfortunately, "The Modi government brought back industrial policy, usually associated with the licence-permit raj of the 1960s and 70s," wrote Rahul Jacob. "Most observers believe the principal opposition today to 1990s-styled liberalization is spearheaded by ministers within the Modi government rather than industry, which in many ways makes this reversal much more potent -- and permanent." "For starters, import substitution industrialisation (ISI), which entails progressive replacement of imports by domestic production, was precisely the strategy we had pursued until 1991," wrote Arvind Panagariya. "In Asia, most countries that have achieved industrialization have used a version of the same policy," wrote Diva Jain. "The only way for the Indian economy to break out of this middling rate of growth is to look outward for export-based growth drivers." Perhaps, the government wants to take us to our glorious past. All the way back.