This chapter examines the latest political economic trends in India through the combined lens of Polanyian political economy and Foucauldian poststructuralist critique of development. I argue that socio-economic restructuring has been accompanied with specific discursive practices designed to cultivate “resilience” and “empowerment” among the Indian people, particularly among women. Embedded in the assumptions of individuality and market rationality, these concepts contribute to the kind of economism critiqued by Karl Polanyi. Empirically, the chapter investigates the influence of powerful international aid agencies, notably the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in the reconfiguration of local economies and livelihoods. Through critical discourse analysis, it examines USAID's programmatic literature, revealing the underlying power relations within the Agency's discourses of vulnerability, resilience, and empowerment. From this combined Polanyian Foucauldian perspective, the study concludes that the Indian case demonstrates how the pursuit of a free market ideal fosters the emergence of a quasi-free homo economicus shaped by neoliberal rationality and a market-driven conception of justice.