Getting India Back on Track

Bibek Debroy

Description

Getting India Back on Track brings together some of India's most accomplished analysts to spur a public debate about the reform agenda the new government should pursue in order to return the country to a path of high growth. It explores the challenges and opportunities faced by one of the most important-yet least understood-nations on earth and convenes some of India's most leading policymakers to recommend policies in every major sector of the Indian economy. These seventeen focused and concise memoranda offer the next generation of leaders and the general public alike a clear blueprint for India's future.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Economic growth
• Political economy
• India

Informations

• Publié par: Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
• Date de parution: 11 juin 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184006117
• Langue: English

Extrait

Edited by Bibek Debroy, Ashley J. Tellis & Reece Trevor

GETTING INDIA BACK ON TRACK
An Action Agenda for Reform
Foreword by Ratan N. Tata
RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Contents
About the Authors
Introduction: Completing Unfinished Business From The Long View To The Short
Foreword
Chapter 1: Maintaining Macroeconomic Stability
Chapter 2: Dismantling The Welfare State
Chapter 3: Revamping Agriculture And The Public Distribution System
Chapter 4: Revisiting Manufacturing Policy
Chapter 5: Generating Employment
Chapter 6: Expanding Education And Skills
Chapter 7: Confronting Health Challenges
Chapter 8: Modernizing Transport Infrastructure
Chapter 9: Managing Urbanization
Chapter 10: Renovating Land Management
Chapter 11: Addressing Water Management
Chapter 12: Reforming Energy Policy And Pricing
Chapter 13: Managing The Environment
Chapter 14: Strengthening Rule Of Law
Chapter 15: Correcting The Administrative Deficit
Chapter 16: Building Advanced Defense Technology Capacity
Chapter 17: Rejuvenating Foreign Policy
Contributors
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
Follow Random House
Copyright
About the Authors
Bibek Debroy is a professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. He has worked in academia, industry chambers, and government, including in leadership positions in the Legal Adjustments and Reforms for Globalizing the Economy project and the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor. Debroy is the author of several books, papers, and articles. He holds degrees from Presidency College in Calcutta, the Delhi School of Economics, and Trinity College in Cambridge.
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Ashley J. Tellis is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace specializing in international security, defense, and Asian strategic issues. While on assignment to the U.S. Department of State as senior adviser to the undersecretary of state for political affairs, he was intimately involved in negotiating the civil nuclear agreement with India. Previously, he was commissioned into the Foreign Service and served as senior adviser to the ambassador at the U.S. embassy in New Delhi. He also served on the National Security Council staff as special assistant to the president and senior director for strategic planning and Southwest Asia.
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Reece Trevor is a research assistant in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he previously served as a junior fellow focusing on South Asian security and U.S. grand strategy. He completed his bachelor s degree with honors at the University of Chicago.
Introduction
Completing Unfinished Business From The Long View To The Short
ASHLEY J. TELLIS *
T he 2014 national elections will be a critical waypoint along the road to realizing India s ambitions of resuscitating economic growth. Opinion survey after opinion survey in the prelude to the polls has suggested a deeply rooted yearning for change. And, in what seems like a conspicuous anomaly when judged against the sweep of India s postindependence history, the electorate at large-both in urban and rural areas- seems seized this time around by the imperative of returning the country to a path of high growth.
India s economic performance was continuously subpar for many decades prior to the 1980s, if not 1991 as well. As long as that was the case, elevated growth sustained for long periods of time was only a dream. But the transformations that have occurred in recent times, beginning with the economic reforms unleashed in the last decade of the last century, have finally given the Indian masses a taste of what structural change, centered on unleashing the energies of a market system, can bring to their everyday lives in terms of both increased wealth and wider economic development. The current explosion of resentment against corruption in India only testifies to the popular desire for better distribution of the nation s economic gains. Such an effort will be doomed to failure if these rewards cannot be produced through continuing growth.
The intense national anxiety in recent years about India s economic slowdown corroborates the proposition that although the voting public may not understand abstruse economics, it has an instinctive sense of when political direction and policy change help sustain or undermine growth. Whatever the balance between the exogenous and the endogenous causes of India s recent economic slowdown may be, there is a widespread conviction in the body politic that the national leadership has failed to steer the nation in a productive direction economically. That leads inexorably to the question of what must be done to recover momentum when the new government takes office.
This volume represents a small effort undertaken by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace toward answering that question. Obviously, the solutions proffered to such a deceptively simple query can materialize at many levels. After some reflection, the editors of this book concluded that the most useful contribution would consist of relatively short, focused essays that examined key aspects of mainly (though not exclusively) the Indian economy, whose continued reform would be central to accelerating growth. The topics covered, accordingly, range from agriculture and the environment to infrastructure and manufacturing to politico-bureaucratic processes and strategic partnerships abroad. Altogether, the seventeen chapters collected here offer wide-ranging analyses that lead uniformly to specific policy suggestions in each issue area for the consideration of the next government. These recommendations by no means exhaust the totality of the reforms that will be necessary for India s comprehensive transformation over the long term. Rather, they are oriented principally toward what can be achieved in the short term, meaning the life of the 16th Lok Sabha, on the assumption that it will serve a full constitutional term in office.
The conclusions emerging from such a diverse body of analysis are impossible to summarize in any introduction. To the degree that common themes can be culled, the various essays in different ways emphasize the imperatives of continued reform for both economic and strategic reasons; the criticality of returning to the path of high growth and the centrality of markets in the process; the importance of appropriately strengthening key state institutions; the priority of getting the details right for the success of future reforms; and, finally, the necessity of purposive action at the state level, given both the relevant constitutional mandates and the steady shift in power from the central government to the states.
Above all, the essays in this volume consistently look forward, to necessary tasks that are yet to be completed. That very fact, nonetheless, serves as a reminder of how much India s future reforms stem from its grand-but in at least one respect problematic-inheritance. Reviewing that bequest forms the core of this introduction: taking the long, retrospective, view, it highlights the deep roots of the challenges to successful transformation, thus making the necessity for speedy implementation of the recommendations found in the seventeen policy chapters all the more imperative for India s continued success.
THE TRIADIC FOUNDATIONS OF THE INDIAN PROJECT
The Indian national project has undeniably been more successful than was predicted at the time of India s birth as a modern state. When India received its independence in 1947, many skeptics doubted that such a country marked by crushing poverty, bewildering diversities, and weak institutions could long endure. Winston Churchill spoke for the legions of cynics when he plainly declared-long before the British Raj ended in the subcontinent-that India was little other than an abstraction ... a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator. Viewed sixty-six years after its founding, the Indian nation has indeed proved the pessimists wrong: not only has the country managed to preserve its national unity, its territorial integrity, and its political autonomy largely unscathed, but it has done so through a historically unprecedented experiment centered on building, as Jawaharlal Nehru told Andr Malraux, a just society by just means.
This monumentally ambitious project was erected on a distinctive triadic foundation of liberal democracy, civic nationalism, and socialist economics. These three components were intended to be mutually reinforcing. Together they were meant to fulfill India s dream of becoming a great power in the most comprehensive sense envisioned by the modernists of India s founding generation. That India was a great civilization was to them an evident and acknowledged fact. But transforming this venerable entity into a great power in the contemporary sense-one that would possess the capacity to exert wide influence beyond its own borders-would require India to become the paragon of a new political order.
The success of this order would hinge fundamentally on its ability to produce rapid growth and meaningful development, which would eliminate mass poverty while bringing justice and dignity to millions of socially disenfranchised Indians. These citizens would continue to associate peacefully with their well-to-do countrymen, making decisions about their common future through a system of universal franchise that, whatever outcomes it produced, would be sufficiently respectful of the identities and preferences of the diverse people who made up this new nation. If these accomplishments provided the opportunities for India s millions to flourish and for the Indian state itself to be empowered, the country would undeniably become a true example of political achievement to others. By that very fact it could then lay claim to a seat at the global high tables, where it would participate in making the rules that advanced its vision of a just and pea