NEW DELHI — After years of intense debate, India's government agreed Friday to open the country's retail sector to global behemoths like Walmart and Ikea, pushing for a profound shift in India's economic and political direction.
A sharp slowdown in economic growth and a sense of impending political collapse has prompted the government to finally act on long-pending proposals to loosen market restrictions in hopes of luring more foreign investment and expertise.
''The time for big-bang reforms has come,'' the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, said, ''and if we go down, we will go down fighting.''
Singh is widely credited with helping bring about India's first great bout of economic changes in 1991, when he was finance minister.
But his reputation ebbed in recent months as the government's economic agenda stalled.
A recent coal corruption scandal has also tainted Singh and led the country's leading opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, to shut down Parliament in recent weeks with calls for his resignation.
Balpir Punj, a spokesman for the Bharatiya Janata Party, told a TV news channel that the measures passed Friday by the governing United Progressive Alliance were ''a very cheap attempt by the UPA to divert attention from the 'coalgate' scam.''
"We are totally opposed to it and we are going to fight it tooth and nail,'' Punj said of the economic measures, despite the fact that his party had proposed some of them itself when it was in power a decade ago.
Chandrajit Banerjee, the director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry, welcomed Friday's policy changes. He said Friday's announcement was ''a tremendous boost not only to the sectors in question, but is a huge mood lifter.''
India's retail sector is dominated by small shops, and its wholesale distribution networks are disastrously inefficient.