Revisiting the idea and project of India

Rather than offer a laundry list of ‘critical reforms in their latest book, A Sixth Of Humanity, Arvind Subramanian and Devesh Kapur identify the necessary conditions that would give India a fair shot at solving the important challenges ahead. An excerpt

- 

For several months of the year, the people in New Delhi, the pulsating heart and prestigious capital of India, and the urban agglomeration of thirty-three million people around it, live in an ‘open-air gas chamber’, as a former Chief Justice of India put it. At times, the darkness-at-noon quality of light can have an eerie, apocalyptic foreboding. The air quality routinely breaches hazardous levels of safety.

Yet, despite the tangible (health and other) costs, not just to the poor but the middle class and elite, particularly egregious for their children, being experienced in the now rather than in the future (as with climate change); despite there being no prospects for the influential elite to conveniently exit (as with other poorly provided government services such as water or education or health); despite India being the embarrassing focus of global attention; and despite the Supreme Court first passing orders in 1986, the air pollution problem has persisted for four decades with little prospect of resolution.

‘The expectation from us, as we look ahead at the end of this book, is to speak to Big Questions: will India become a developed country by 2047? Will India become a superpower? What are three critical reforms or actions that will propel India forward? And so on.