Part 2: Three decades after the 1991 crisis, India’s record Forex reserves have transformed the country from a crisis-prone borrower into an economy with a formidable external shock absorber. AI generated image Three decades ago, India had so few dollars that it had to pledge gold to avert a balance-of-payments crisis. Today, it sits on a foreign-exchange war chest of more than US$700 billion. The journey from near-bankruptcy to external resilience is one of the quieter succe

Part 1: The journey from US$1.2 billion in reserves to US$729.3 billion is one of India’s great economic transformations. Part I examines how the foundations were laid. India once had enough foreign exchange to pay for barely two weeks of essential imports. Today, it has enough to cover nearly 11 months of merchandise imports. The distance between those two numbers tells one of the most consequential economic stories of modern India. India’s foreign exchange reserves touched