Till independence, banks in India were mostly private in nature, run by businessmen. Hence, the spread of credit was limited to urban areas and deposits were channelled towards related business groups. This created huge risks for depositors' money. The number of banks was large and failures frequent. Banks were characterised by low capital bases, insufficient liquid assets and inter-connected lending. Post independence, the government took various steps to ensure socially justified distribution of credit and proper flow to productive sectors of the economy. Several steps were taken to improve their presence, especially in rural areas. Banks were given a developmental role and it was felt that control of private banks in individual hands was doing more damage than good.

The ASEAN-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA) leads to the reduction and elimination of tariffs on 80 percent of the goods. Though the scepticism on the FTA is apparently legitimate and is simplistic to attribute the price fall of farm commodities to the increase in imports as a result of tariff reduction under FTA, trade statistics and recent empirical studies do not support this proposition. On the other hand, the already existing duty free import regime is seen as an opportunity. Imports also assume equal importance and the arrival of duty free raw materials for further processing and value addition enables more employment generation, higher income for stakeholders, and forward movement in the value chain. Infrastructure is often taken in the general sense at the policy level and failed to address the specific issues related to the reduction of risks and transaction costs, i.e., the invisible infrastructure such as easy documentation, customs and regulatory regimes and mutual recognition, promotion of commodity futures markets and electronic commerce.

Global sourcing of IT and IT enabled Services represents a $1.5 trillion industry of which the share occupied by the Indian IT services industry is rapidly growing, experiencing double digit growth rates over the last decade, currently standing at about $71.3 billion employing 2.3 million people. Given that human capital is the crucial ingredient for the IT services industry, growing revenue by simply adding more employees is going to be challenging. Historically, the companies followed the linear growth model to increase their revenues by boosting the employee numbers to generate additional headcount based billing translating into higher revenues. However, the problems with this model are becoming evident as the revenue per employee has reportedly fallen significantly over the years in the Indian IT Services companies (Business Today (February 11, 2007)). Among the many explanations put forth by experts, this has happened not only because of the loss of productivity due to "benching" of employees where they do not contribute to revenues and yet are paid their salaries, but also due to supply constraints of skilled IT programmers. It can also be argued that managing the complexity large pools of knowledge workers working together to provide end-to-end services is non-trivial, hence scaling may provided lower than expected returns.