Foreign Exchange Reserves

THE manner in which the problem of what to do with our foreign exchange reserves is being approached within the government is most curious consi-dering (a) that we are supposed to have over two decades of economic planning behind us and have just given final shape to the fifth in the series of five-year Plans; (b) that for almost all of this period lack of foreign exchange has been accepted as one of the major constraints on higher invest-ment and faster growth; and (c) that it has been one of our explicitly stated objectives to reduce, and do away with, dependence on foreign aid