Every capital control India maintains today is the descendant of a single idea: forex belongs to GoI, and citizens transact in it by permission. Fera 1973 criminalised that idea. Fema 1999 merely civilised it.
It was born of the same pre-1991 beliefs in nationalisation and licence raj, when the entrepreneur queued for licences and the wealth creator was a suspect. An economy aspiring to be the world's third-largest cannot be financed by a jurisprudence of bureaucratic approvals.
