When the Indian finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, flew to Chicago recently to address a group of American executives, it was to deliver an urgent message: India is still open for business.

Usually a cautious speaker who offers only vague promises, Mukherjee eagerly promoted specific new deals from New Delhi, where the national government has become alarmed by the sudden slowdown of India’s economy.

He reeled off a list of pro-business policies his government had recently approved or was planning to approve: allowing foreigners to invest directly in the Indian stock market; allowing overseas specialty retailers like The Gap to open stores in the country under their own ownership; and, soon, letting in bigger retailers like Wal-Mart Stores. And though Mukherjee did not cite it, he could just as easily have mentioned a proposal the government is considering to let foreign airlines buy stakes of as large as 49 per cent in Indian carriers.

Skeptics wonder whether Indian politics will really allow Mukherjee and his boss, prime minister Manmohan Singh, to force significant change on the nation’s hidebound protectionism. But there is no question that after years of taking rapid economic growth for granted, New Delhi is finally awaking to the need for new reform policies and greater foreign investment.

The change comes as analysts and India’s central bank have concluded that growth — which was at 8.4 per cent or higher for much of the past decade — will fall sharply to 7 per cent in the current fiscal year and will remain sluggish in the next one, which begins in April. On Tuesday, India’s Central Statistics Office said the economy will probably grow only 6.9 per cent in the current financial year.

The signs of new salesmanship from Mukherjee are a notable departure from his and other Indian officials’ demeanor for much of 2011, even as their economy was slowing and inflation gathered steam. Preoccupied by a big anti-corruption movement and internal bickering among politicians, officials tended to dismiss the gloomy data as either unimportant or only temporary setbacks.

But since the beginning of the year, Indian leaders have begun publicly acknowledging the nation’s economic problems. “The growth slowdown was a nice wake-up call for us,” Kaushik Basu, the chief economic adviser to the finance ministry, said.

Although Basu noted that some of the slowdown could be attributed to global economic problems, policy makers now recognise that “decision making had slowed down, reforms had slowed down,” he said. “This has the saving grace of avoiding the trap of denial, which is always a risk in policy making.”

And so officials are pushing ideas that would have seemed anathema just a few months ago — including the proposal to let foreign airlines buy big stakes in the country’s carriers. While nationalist sentiments have long blocked such a move, steep losses at big carriers like Kingfisher Airlines, Jet Airways and state-owned Air India seem to be leading policy makers to rethink their earlier opposition.

Earlier in January, meanwhile, the government began allowing retailers that sell just one brand of products, like The Gap or Nike, to open wholly-owned stores in India — as long as they buy 30 per cent of their goods from Indian artisans and small Indian companies.

When the chief executive of Ikea, the Swedish furniture and furnishing retailer that has long hoped to set up stores in India, publicly balked at that 30 per cent requirement, saying it might force Ikea to postpone its India plans, Indian officials swung into action.

The commerce minister, Anand Sharma, met in Paris with the Ikea chief, Mikael Ohlsson, to try to allay his fears. It is unclear how effective that intervention was, or what potential inducements Sharma might have offered. But according to the government’s account of the meeting, Ohlsson told Sharma that he would soon return to India to speak to officials. An Ikea spokesman did not respond to a message seeking comment.

The steps so far indicate “some appetite for economic reform,” said Mark Martyrossian, a fund manager for Tiburon Partners, an investment firm based in London that has stakes in Indian companies. But he predicted that the process will be slow and painful because of the “vested interests at play.”

Skeptics point to the politically disastrous effort by New Delhi late last year to open the country’s $500 billion retail market to foreign companies.