What state govts can learn from de Soto and a market fundamentalist

If capitalism has to work in developing economies, including India, it has to become more inclusive, it has to understand and deliver property rights to more people. That’s what Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, adviser to 40 governments, told me last week as we discussed the future of capitalism in India. For this, he said, governments need to first study the laws that govern property rights and then change them so as to reflect their country-specific realities. The conversion of squatter rights to legal ones, for instance.

Opinion in The Indian Express, October 29, 2007

‘Whether you are democrat or dictator, on the left or right, exclusion will sooner or later destabilise you’

The Left hates your ideas, the Right wants to smother them. You must be doing something good.

There are many people in my organisation who have Left leanings and many are with the Right. You are probably referring to the assassination attempts on me. Those were specific. They had to do with the fact that I wrote a book The Other Path. The Peruvian Marxist Terror group Shining Path had intellectual pretensions. The advantage for them in the country was that there was no challenge to them from the right or the centre. After the book there were a variety of organisations, which originally were trade unions, that created the ripple effect.

Interview in The Indian Express, October 27, 2007