A nation on the edge

A retrospective of how India’s growth has been precocious in many ways, managing enduring contradictions

- SHYAMAL MAJUMDAR

'A SIXTH OF Humanity' is not light reading-far from it, but for those willing to engage with its depth, it offers rich reward by being rigorous, wide-ranging and insightful. It may be less comfortable for readers looking for a simple narrative, but for anyone seeking to understand "why India is the way it is" and "where it might be going", this is essential reading.

The book is an audacious attempt to trace how India-uniquely and daringly attempted four concurrent transformations-building a state, creating an economy, changing society, and forging a sense of nationhood under conditions of universal suffrage. Few books attempt such a grand sweep of India's development history while integrating politics, economics, and social change. The joint authorship by Devesh Kapur, one of India's most respected political scientists, and Arvind Subramanian, one of its best known economists, adds to the book's strength as it includes insights from politics, economics, history, and literature and provides a developmental history of India that is big, bold, engaging, and unique.

The authors argue that India's path has been distinctively 'precocious' in comparative terms: democracy before development; high-skilled services before low-skilled manufacturing, and globalisation that sent talented people abroad while many at home were left behind. This encapsulates a central framing of the book: that India's development path was unusual (and perhaps unorthodox) in which multiple transformations (state, economy, society, nation) were attempted simultaneously, often out of sequence compared to other countries.

Even as India has achieved impressive milestones (digital infrastructure, electoral democracy, global presence), the book underscores enduring contradictions: inequality, regional disparities, under-provision of public goods, and fragility of institutions.