Everything that’s wrong with India’s development story

This new book inquires into the conditions under which India has tried to develop in the past 75-plus years

- Puja Mehra

A Sixth of Humanity: By Arvind Subramanian and Devesh Kapur, HarperCollins India, 760 pages, ₹1,299.

More than 75 years after independence, India remains poor. Countries that started out at similar points have raced ahead on growth in per capita GDP and quality of life. The economic and social ruptures inherited at independence remain unreconciled. They may even have been aggravated in recent times, threatening the exceptional success in nation-building.

India’s development miscarriage is a bustling genre. Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian’s A Sixth of Humanity is the newest interpretation in this rich field of memoir, biography, history and research. Kapur, a political scientist, and Subramanian, an economist with a past stint in a high government office, are well-equipped to enquire into the political economy conditions under which India has tried to develop in the past 75-plus years.

They trace this arc through five ideological phases: The planning phase from 1950 to 1980; the partial and gradual liberalisation of the 1980s; the neoliberal phase from 1991 to 2010; the post-global financial crisis phase from 2010 till the covid-19 pandemic in 2020; and the post-neoliberal phase in which India is embracing protectionism and industrial policy of the sort that South Korea and Japan successfully dabbled in, in the 1960s, by promoting select conglomerates as national champions, and state capitalism echoing the Nehruvian era.