Abstract
While the service sector has shown impressive performance at the aggregate level, there is very little to show that there has been any transformative change, except in cases of telecommunication and information technology services. The service sector has been showing better performance compared to agriculture and industry all along since the late 1960s. While it was premised that post-reform access to services will improve along with quality, the performance in most sectors did not meet the expectations. Even in some sub-sectors where improvement has been observed, it is difficult to attribute the same to the policy reforms. Rather they might have been due to technological changes that are exogenous to the reforms process. Moreover, the business process reengineering also meant that several activities that were done in the manufacturing sector is now being outsourced to external agencies which might have shown in terms of better performance of the service sector. Given this, it is not only difficult to claim that India had service-led growth, maintaining overall growth with excessive reliance on the service sector can become difficult in the future.
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Nanda, N. (2019). Causes and Consequences of Service Sector Growth: Perceptions and Realities. In: Biswas, P., Das, P. (eds) Indian Economy: Reforms and Development. India Studies in Business and Economics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8269-7_8
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