Step out into the streets, go shopping in a departmental store, or simply surf satellite TV channels. You will find the 90s prodigious child, Freedom, staring you in the face-again, again, and again. Freedom manifesting itself simply, but relentlessly, in the wide variety of passenger cars, the 70 different brands of shampoo, or as many TV channels. Freedom of industry translating into freedom of the consumer.

Yet, in the 56th year of our political independence, it's easy to forget that consumer freedom is barely a decade old. For more than 40 years, the consumer was a slave to a wilful economy, where state was the biggest entrepreneur; where a handful of private business groups lived with licensing and quotas and didn't complain because they held the consumer to ransom; where competition was a word found only in the consumer's dictionary, and not of the manufacturer.

That's why the profound changes wrought by a mere decade are all the more remarkable. Forget about the end of the Licence Raj. The far bigger deregulation was of the minds. A country of a billion people finally waking up to the world without and to the potential of what it could be within. It is that spirit of economic freedom that this special Independence Day issue seeks to capture. Not surprisingly, then, all our "chapters" are freedom-themed: Freedom from Genes, Freedom from Limited Means, Freedom from Geography, Freedom from Licensing, Freedom to Start Afresh, Freedom to Serve, Freedom of Choice, even Freedom to Chill.

Each of these is a theme that you can relate to. Who doesn't know of a family that traded in its old car or refrigerator for a sleek new upgrade, courtesy consumer credit? Who hasn't looked with envy at the metrosexual male who is rapidly climbing the corporate ladder because he's not just an MBA but smooth-talking and -looking too, thanks to his daily regimen of beauty and fitness? Or that 40-something who retired after striking gold at his technology company? As recently as the 80s, all this would have been unthinkable.

Indeed, the single-biggest message that the 90s may have driven home to Indians is that they can do it. Look at the BPO phenomenon-a product of the 90s. This infant industry employs 170,000 lakh people and is expected to generate $1.2 billion (Rs 5,543 crore) in annual revenues (of third-party BPOs alone) in 2003. While lower costs may have been the bait to start with, the lure now is as much the quality of workforce. Ask anybody-GE, Intel, Cisco, or Microsoft. Tomorrow, it could be biotech, electronics, or a wide range of research.

But as the 90s have proved, it doesn't have to be an either-or game for India Inc. While no doubt knowledge-based industries such as information technology and biotechnology offer India an easier route to the world markets, opportunities exist in old world industries too. As most companies that tried found out, it is possible to shed the baggage of 40 years-low manufacturing scales, a lack of branding and marketing, and poor processes-and move along more nimbly, leveraging their advantages of low-cost, but skilled, workforce (See Freedom from Licensing, page 110).

Tata Motors, for instance, has not just built its own passenger car, but created a brand that it thinks can be marketed globally. Ranbaxy Laboratories started off as all other pharma companies in India did, reverse engineering drugs. But today, the Rs 3,713.8-crore company licenses new molecules to its far bigger competitors, and derives more than half of its revenues from outside India in markets such as the US. The A.V. Birla group has built on its strengths in commodity businesses in India and elsewhere in the world. Reliance Industries has moved swiftly from textiles to petrochemicals to gas to telecom to biotech.

As Anand Mahindra, President of CII and Vice Chairman and Managing Director-and one of our five columnists this issue-points out, there really is no stopping India Inc. For decades it lay bound within the confines of an artificial economic wall. Today, the walls have been torn down and the world is for India's taking. It's that freedom this issue celebrates.