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Detours on the Four Lane Highway to Modernization

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January 14, 2019Is India a Flailing State?Detours on the Four Lane Highway to Modernization Lant PritchettHarvard Kennedy SchoolIntroduction The premise of the recent Indian novel Q&A is that the hero, an uneducated working class waiter in a downscale restaurant, has won a billion rupees in a game show that requires answers to twelve questions of increasing difficulty. The novel them weaves in and out of the hero’s life with vignettes that reveal how he came to know the answers to each of the questions. The novel opens with the hero having won the game show but does not have a million rupees but rather is being beaten by the police in a Mumbai police station as the producer of the game show, short on cash, has decided to pay-off the police to extract a false confession of cheating rather than pay out the winnings. This is not unusual. As one reads the novel in each instance in which the hero’s life intersects with agents of the government—from police to hospitals to orphanages--he is treated with the same mix of venality and casual brutality. This is especially striking for two reasons. First, the bad behavior of the government is not a theme of the book nor is it ever remarked upon, rather these descriptions are there to provide verisimilitude of a real person’s life—to make the book seem realistic and in-Preliminary Version: 1For Comments Onlytouch with the “true” India. Second, the novel was written by an active duty member of the Indian Foreign Service. To understand the Indian state today one has to read fiction that acknowledges it is fiction because its non-fiction, the streams of government reports and commissions anddocuments produced by official agencies (including of those foreign agencies working with the government) are truly fiction. Because of the incredibly spectacular intelligence,cleverness, and competence of the top tiers of the Indian government—in particular the national services such as the Indian Administrative Service—it has managed to project the myth that India is just another regular modern state, with a growing economy, a democratic politics, a functional civil service, and making progress on social issues. For instance, ask any of them in an official setting about India’s health system and you will get an elaborate and intriguing story about how many of this type of facility per that type of population, how each of those is staffed, what services they provide and the recent efforts to address their problems, like eliminating vacancies---all backed, if you want it, with data and reports. Travel to any part of India, but particularly the North—the BIMARU states—and you will realize that this description of India’s actual health system, while it may serve as a organizing myth for the normative goals of the system, is,as a description of India’s “health system”, a complete fiction. India today is a fascinating mix. The economy is booming. Amazingly, after two decades of rapid growth performance that started in the 1980s, and that continued, after a brief interruption in 1991, after the economic reforms through the 1990s has accelerated again in the last few years. India’s democracy, by any measure, continues to astound, as despite all kinds of pressures, free and fair elections are held and control of the Preliminary Version: 2For Comments Onlygovernment changes hands regularly. Unlike all its neighbors, no one can argue that India is a failing or failed state. The government of India and its personnel at the top levels in the elite institutions is impressive indeed. The Indian Supreme Court, the Indian Institutes of Technology, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), India’s nuclear program are all world class institutions. The IAS is full of officers who have passed an entrance examination and selection process that makes getting into Harvard look like a walk in the park. As a personal example, having lived and worked in India recently for the World Bank (from 2004 to 2007) my impression was that the World Bank, which tries to recruit staff of highquality with international expertise (and to my assessment succeeds), was by and large matched or over-matched at nearly every level by their counter-parts at the correspondinglevels in the government. The brains of the Indian state can formulate excellent policies and programs in nearly every domain. The head is so strong it can even remain in teetering control of the mountain of official paper work the maintenance of the appearance of the function of those programs requires (no one who has visited the offices of senior IAS officers have help but be awed at the amount of paperwork they handle—and simultaneously horrified by the amount they have to). And yet, as I describe more fully below the capability of the Indian state to implement programs and policies is weak—and in many domains it is not obvious it is improving. In police, tax collection, education, health, power, water supply—in nearly every routine service—there is rampant absenteeism, indifference, incompetence, and corruption. Preliminary Version: 3For Comments OnlyHow does one reconcile the contradictions of a booming economy and democracywith world class elite institutions and yet chaotic conditions in service provision of the most rudimentary types? I argue that for India we need a new category. I argue that India is today a flailing state---a nation-state in which the head, that is the elite institutions at the national (and in some states) level remain sound and functional but that this head is no longer reliably connected via nerves and sinews to its own limbs. In many parts of India in many sectors, the everyday actions of the field level agents of the state—policemen, engineers, teachers, health workers—are increasingly beyond the control of the administration at the national or state level. The contrast with China could not be more striking. In China one worries that, due to the lack of the processes of democratic representation the head of the state, while capable, is beyond the control of the citizens. Yet, at the same time one reads of local government officials being executed for corruption. Clearly the head has a strong interestin retaining control of the administrative apparatus of implementation. The first section outlines the four-fold structure of the transitions to modernizationand suggests the term “flailing” state for those


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