With fanfare and exuberance, India recently celebrated the 50th year of its independence.

Indians have sustained the world's largest democracy and free press in an ethnically and linguistically diverse country. As a result of economic reforms initiated in the early 1990s, Indians also have enjoyed a recent surge in economic growth that holds promise in the years ahead for reducing poverty, raising living standards, and creating employment throughout this nation of nearly 1 billion people.

In two path-breaking agreements between the Harvard Institute for International Development and India's central government and one state government (Tamil Nadu), HIID is embarking on a new research and advisory program designed to help India deepen its new economic reforms. While the Institute has provided such research and advice to dozens of countries around the world over the past several decades, and has worked in India as well, the new agreements signal HIID's first major foray into broad-based research and advisory services in the world's largest democracy. For India's part, this is one of the rare occasions in which the Indian central government and one of its state governments have sought such economic policy advice and research from an external academic organization.

The key focus of the research for the central government will be to understand trends in foreign direct investment to India, in order to help the Indian government achieve its goal of greatly expanding such investments in the future. The government of India has announced the specific goal of attracting $10 billion in foreign direct investments per year by the year 2000, especially in promising sectors such as food-processing, software, and other labor-intensive, export-oriented activities. In its work with Tamil Nadu, HIID will focus on research and advising to help that state develop into a "major platform for export-oriented manufacturing production." Much of the work will focus on tax reform, public sector reform, infrastructure development, and social policy reforms, particularly in the areas of health care and education.

HIID's Director, Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, will direct the new India Program, and Nirupam Bajpai, research associate at HIID, will be the Institute's coordinator of the program.