"In a vast country with millions of people and poverty rampant, we cannot liberalise recklessly in such a way that the balance of society is upset, and while some sections flourish, make profits, the rest find themselves helpless and left with no employment," the president said.

Narayanan was responding to the question, how he would assess the experience of economic liberalisation in India at this juncture? The text of the conversation with Hindu editor N Ram was telecast and broadcast by Doordarshan and All India Radio on the eve of Independence Day. It was officially released by the president's secretariat on Friday.

Emphasising that liberalisation was an "irreversible process", the president said it had arisen from the dictates of the needs of the economy as it had developed.

"As a result of our planned economic development, not central planning but mixedplanning we have experimented with, we have moved to a stage of partial maturity of the economy, when we need new forms of management, expression of the spirit of enterprise, so that the economy can move forward. The compulsion to liberalise and globalise arose from this," Narayanan said.

Asked what economic progress was achieved after independence, especially in the life and work of the working millions, the president said the masses had to be given a sense of economic liberation, and for this, land reforms were necessary, a process which he regretted had not yet been completed.

"To get a sensation of economic empowerment in society, even a bit of land of their own is necessary for the common people," he said.

The president described the issue of intellectual property rights and patents as a "vulnerable area". Although India had signed the World Trade Organisation (WTO) treaty, it still had to safeguard itself. Developed countries who had become members of the WTO were adopting anti-dumping measuresliberally as also tariff and non-tariff barriers. ``So we have to carefully argue within the WTO system our case," Narayanan said.