When Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, drafted his newly independent country’s first five-year economic plan in 1951, he pitched for a growth rate of 2.1 per cent. The forecast was wildly ambitious. Under British rule, the Indian economy had bumped along in the decades before the second world war with 0.1 per cent per capita growth.

In recent years ambitious targets have again been all the rage, with heady talk of India aspiring to compete with China with a double-digit growth rate. Yet now, against the backdrop of high-profile corruption scandals and soaring inflation, ambitions are once again dampened – and some are suggesting that is a good thing.

In the years after independence the prevailing wisdom was rather more pessimistic than Nehru about India’s prospects. Milton Friedman described in 1963 a real danger that “India will stretch into centuries what took other countries decades”. Its heat-sapped people, he said, were viewed as “unenterprising and slothful”, though he did add that their entrepreneurial energies were suffocated by the state.