On "Adopting Global Best Practices" — A Way Forward (11th NITI Aayog Council)
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Respected Shri Narendra Modi ji,
In your message on X after chairing the 11th NITI Aayog Governing Council meeting on “Inclusive Human Development for Viksit Bharat@2047,” you joined two ideas in a single breath — “adopting global best practices” and “strengthening the journey of reforms.” You named renewable energy in particular, and you set it all within our shared faith in cooperative federalism.
May I, a 93-year-old citizen who has been writing on exactly this theme for over a decade, offer a respectful “way forward” — because those two ideas of yours are, in truth, one idea.
Two old blog notes of mine bear directly on your words:
1. “How China Makes Cheap?” (09 Nov 2014)
https://myblogepage.blogspot.com/2014/11/how-china-makes-cheap.html
2. “Level-Playing Field is a Double-Edged Sword” (09 Feb 2017) — itself building on my note of 12 June 2016
https://myblogepage.blogspot.com/2017/02/level-playing-field-is-double-edged.html
In 2014, when there were loud demands to ban cheap Chinese firecrackers, agarbattis, machine tools, power equipment — and solar panels — I asked the one question no one was asking: not how do we keep these goods out, but what enables the Chinese to make them so cheap in the first place? My answer then was that the practice worth adopting is not the product but the system behind it — their labour policies, single-window clearances, land-use laws, bank interest rates, tax structure and manufacturing methods. Import THAT, I wrote, and we will both save and create jobs.
In 2017, when Sachin Bansal and others demanded a “level playing field” to protect Indian firms from foreign capital, I offered a caution: a level playing field is a double-edged sword — two can play at protection, and it does not in any case exist, since no two countries share the same eco-system of manpower, finance, land, policy and infrastructure. Demanding it is futile. The wiser course, I argued, is to benchmark ourselves continuously against the world’s best on each input — and to ask: how did they get there, and what reforms must WE introduce to catch up? That is precisely the marriage of “best practices” and “reforms” you spoke of this week.
Read together, Sir, the two notes suggest a way forward in four steps:
1. Adopt the enablers, not merely the practice. Let NITI Aayog take each global best practice we admire and trace it down to the handful of structural conditions that make it work elsewhere — the labour rule, the clearance window, the land law, the cost of capital — and treat THOSE reforms as the real deliverable.
2. Stop chasing a level playing field; chase the benchmark instead. As I wrote in 2017, the field will never be level. So rather than seeking protection, let us name the world’s benchmark on each parameter (ease of doing business, cost of capital, productivity, logistics) and set a national reform target to close the gap — while fiercely defending the one benchmark where India already leads the world: our demographic dividend, the 70 crore youth you rightly called our greatest asset.
3. Make cooperative federalism the delivery engine. Let the States compete to implement these reforms — manufacturing clusters, single-window clearances, plug-and-play parks, sector-aligned skilling — with a public NITI scorecard that ranks them each year. Competitive federalism is what turns a best practice into a habit.
4. Begin with renewable energy — the sector you named. Here the two notes meet: in my 2014 list, “solar panels” was already among the goods we wished to ban. The lesson holds twelve years later. If we merely tariff imported solar, we choose protection — the double edge. If instead we import the SYSTEM that makes Chinese solar cheap (scale, finance, clearances, integrated supply chain), then “Make in India” can come to mean cells, wafers and polysilicon made here, not panels merely assembled here. That is best practice and reform, working as one.
I placed these notes on record in 2014, 2016 and 2017 not to claim foresight, but to offer them now as one citizen’s small contribution to the resolve you articulated this week. If even a single line is of use to NITI Aayog as it studies the States’ best practices and plans the way forward, my writing will have served its purpose.
With respectful regards,
Hemen Parekh (age 93)
Mumbai | 12 June 2026
www.HemenParekh.ai | www.IndiaAGI.ai
