Montek Singh Ahluwalia has been deeply involved with India’s economic reforms since they were launched, in 1991. In those days, as secretary of the Department of Economic Affairs, he worked with then-finance minister Manmohan Singh to assemble a program that would deliver the country from “Hindu rates of growth”—the scathing label given to India’s seeming inability to sustain growth rates of more than 3 percent after its independence, in 1947.

Today Singh is prime minister and Ahluwalia, as deputy chairman of India’s Planning Commission, is the country’s chief economic planner and a close adviser to the administration. (The prime minister is the commission’s chairman.) While the country is basking in the success of economic reform (GDP growth hit 9.4 percent for the fiscal year that ended in March 2007), Ahluwalia is working to make sure that India can sustain these growth rates. The Planning Commission is targeting average annual growth of 9 percent in its 11th Five-Year Plan, which spans 2007 to 2012. The initial reforms, in the early 1990s, were “no-brainers,” the Oxford-educated economist says. They focused on dismantling the “license raj” (a tangle of regulations that gave bureaucrats too much control over too much of the economy and...