An Infrared Look at Uneven India

The two writers present a sweeping account of how democracy shaped—and complicated —India’s development story after 1947

- By SOUMYA BHOWMICK

nA Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey, Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian undertake an ambitious and long-overdue task: to narrate India’s post-1947 journey as a single, interlocking development trajectory that binds politics, institutions and economic change into one sustained argument.

‘The premise appears simple. After Independence, India had to build a nation, construct a capable state, transform its economy and reform society—all while operating as a mass democracy. The complication was that these goals did not always reinforce one another. At times they aligned; at others, they collided. The result is a book that reads less like a linear economic history and more like a carefully mapped political economy of choices, trade-offs and consequences.

What distinguishes this account is its insistence that sequencing matters. India’s, ‘uneven outcomes, the authors argue, cannot be explained merely by weak execution or bad luck. They stem from the order in which priorities were chosen—and from the constituencies that benefited from that order. The country’s development story, therefore, is neither a simple success narrative nor a catalogue of failures. It is the story of a democracy that built some capacities remarkably early while postponing others for decades.