India's Reform Journey Revisited - M. R. Madhavan, PRS Legislative Research

What is one reform that was overlooked in 1991?

A number of things actually, not just one, so what did we do then? We essentially liberalized what were tradables. That's essentially what we did. We did not let's say liberalize the-- we liberalized the capital markets to some extent, to quite an extent. We did not do either the land market or the labor market. That has actually, if you look at the factors of production, affected, but I would say even larger, we have-- and is not just to do with the '91 reforms, we have not invested a lot in human capital in the right way, specifically school education, primary health. That comes back to some extent on to the well-being of people.

I'm not even thinking of them being labor market. I'm saying it's a much larger thing of if it's a state which is supposed to take care of well-being of citizens, these are absolute basics. These are completely missed out, and so that would be-- I would say that we have been talking about these for years but we are not doing anything fundamental even today to address the problems.

What is one reform that India needs today?

In the space I work in, which is legislatures, 1985, something happened, which is that we passed the 52nd constitution amendment which brought in the Tenth Schedule, which is better known as the Anti-Defection Law. This effectively says that, on every vote in parliament or in the state legislature, if the party gives a direction every MP or MLA has to follow that direction. It could be something as trivial as a bill which increases the number of members of the board of State Bank of India by one, an MP cannot have an independent view.

What we have done by that is we have taken away the whole concept of representative democracy where the MP as a person or an MLA as a person, who makes up his or her own mind based on the facts and then decides how to vote on an issue. That could be based on ideology, it could be based on constituency, it could be based on various other things. Now it is just the party direction which you have to blindly follow. If you don't do it, you lose your seat in the legislature. That's the penalty, so nobody can afford to do that.

In effect what we do is, we do have I would say reasonably free and fair elections, after which the prime minister of the chief minister is elected. If the prime minister of the chief minister has-- that party has a majority in the legislature, then nobody can touch est that person for five years, there's zero accountability back. Which is the core of parliamentary democracy because the prime minister or the chief minister decides and issues a whip on every MP or MLA to vote in a way so they can't question that person.

You are effectively electing an autocrat every five years structurally, and that goes against the whole tenet of democracy and of accountability. A lot of our problems stem from that because if there's a government which doesn't have to have accountability on a daily basis, then we are in trouble. I would say that getting rid of Anti-Defection Law is a necessary condition for our democracy to do anything at all.