what have you done for me lately

When Manmohan Singh came into office, nobody had very high expectations. The fact was, businessmen gave a sigh of relief that there was going to be a government and not a long struggle for coalition or chaos of protests against a foreign-born PM. They sighed in relief, too, to see Dr. Singh, a business-friendly face, instead of someone who might have been more interested in the backward-looking socialist programs the party had once touted. Over his first year in office, however, expectations for Dr. Singh have grown with each of his successes in warding off threats, until we are asking "what have we done for me lately" instead of marveling that the government is still standing and hasn't been derailed by its Leftist partners as it has knocked down barriers to foreign investment one after the other. But how well has Dr. Singh really done? What should our expectations be? Scott Baldauf takes up the argument in a recent piece in the Christian Science Monitor. Unfortunately, the piece lacks an educative comparison between Dr. Singh's reform accomplishments and those of his predecessor, Atal Behari Vajpayee.