Book Spotlight: Arvind Subramanian | A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey (co-authored with Devesh Kapur)

It's called A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India's Development Odyssey and it's by Devesh Kapur and me. Devesh, he teaches a course called 'A Sixth of Humanity' and I think we wanted to convey a sense of the world should take India seriously not least because it has so many people and also therefore that India's development experience is something that not only the world should take notice of but that perhaps there are lessons for other countries from India's development experience.

Motivation for the book

First and foremost, of course, both Devesh and I felt that there is a gap in the literature on India. Either you have political scientists writing in their own style and with their own preoccupations and about India and there are economists who've written about India. And our absolutely firm conviction was that if you want to understand development in a new and complicated nation such as India, that you have to understand how the state was transformed, how society was sought to be transformed, how markets were created, and how a sense of nationhood was forged. So nation building, state building, market building and society transformation. And all of this uniquely in the case of India had to happen through democratic politics.

So you had to have this comprehensive approach. Devesh is a political scientist, I am an economist so we thought we could join forces. The other motivation of course was that this should be something that's rigorous because it has a lot of data but also it should be accessible. In some ways our kind of inspiration was Ram Guha's India after Gandhi as it were. Also I used to work in government, I was in charge of writing the Economic Survey of India and certainly some of the surveys that I wrote when I was there seemed to or rather the confidence that one could strike this balance between rigor and readability that experience of writing the survey gave us confidence that we could kind of repeat it again.

Themes explored

One major theme [in the book] is this idea of precociousness. Precociousness means doing something ahead of its time. So in the book we talk about three or four ways in which this precociousness manifests itself. And of course you know when you do this precociousness you always have a sense of relative to who are you precocious or what are you precocious and those judgments are informed by our consistent cross-country comparisons. So for example India did democracy before development and if you look at the other successful models either democracy and development went together, like with the West. Or political development followed economic development like in East Asia or not at all as in the case of China. And India was very different that way so that's and what are the consequences of that the challenges arising from that we discussed that.

The other sense of precociousness is the economic manifestation. Most successful countries go from agriculture to manufacturing to services and India of course famously has kind of skipped the manufacturing sector gone straight from agriculture to high-tech services. That's another precocious dimension and the international manifestation of that of course is that we don't do enough low-skill manufacturing exports. Instead we've actually exported high-skilled talent. And the last sense in which we use the word precocious is in terms of policy choices. India for example famously it prioritized building a welfare state over providing public goods like infrastructure, health, education. Even within education prioritized higher education over basic education. Within health, prioritizing population control and disease control over basic public health and sanitation. So these are the various ways in which it's kind of the precociousness manifests itself and of course we discuss why and their consequences in the book.

Misconceptions Challenged

Many misconceptions that we hope to correct [in the book]. I'll give you a couple for example. We think of the period 1950 to 1980 in India as one of import substitution, i.e we blocked off foreign competition in order to protect and promote our domestic enterprise both public and private sector. That was in fact the rationale for import substitution. What we did was we did keep off the foreign competition but we turned around and instead of favoring the domestic public and private sectors we actually squashed and thwarted the domestic private sector most famously via licensing, for example. So to characterize this as import substitution is actually making a big category error and in fact what we had was actually a regime of scarcity, not one of import substitution. We had scarcity because there was very limited foreign supply. The domestic private sector was crushed and taxed. The domestic public sector turned out to be inefficient and cosseted so it was also not a source of efficient supply. And famously we favored the small scale industry sector which was not very productive. So we stymie the efficient sources of supply and cosset the inefficient sources of supply which leads to a regime of scarcity. So that's one example of where we've gotten the whole reading of the of the 1950s to 80s wrong. 

Takeaways for readers

This is a book that's intended not just for an Indian audience but for an international audience. The one slightly obvious and banal thing to say is that there's been no development experience that is so distinctive as India's has been. So that's kind of one. The other things that there are lessons to be learned for other countries from the whole Indian experience. Just to give you one example in development economics and understanding of economic growth more generally, how should we think about growth and development in a large federal system as it were? What is the role for competitive federalism? What is the role for cooperative federalism? What is the relationship between the second tier of government in India, the states and the third tier of government, the cities and the panchayats? These are all first order questions which we kind of skirt over. We think of India as a country like the United States is a country or Indonesia is a country and all the analysis is as if it's one source of decision making when in fact decision making and governance are so fragmented and decentralized that the Indian experience has a lot to offer. Not that it was perfect by any means. But there are many aspects about the Indian development experience which I think and for an Indian audience, I would say going back to an earlier question, there are lots of surprises in the book; there were things that we discovered that we didn't know so given that we had so many surprises, I think the average Indian reader will encounter many more surprises than we did.