India's Reform Journey Revisited - Neelanjan Sircar, CPR

What is one reform that was overlooked in 1991?

The way that I think about the 1991 reforms and the reforms more generally in the early '90s is that there was a lot of attention paid to economic structural reforms. For someone like me who's a political scientist, the decade of the 1990s is also the decade of political liberalization. We know that that's a point at which the electoral commission becomes far more activist.

We know that in state elections, the effective number of parties basically doubles over that decade. While you have this massive proliferation of parties and perhaps more fair electoral contests, that was the time to think about how to lock in the gains from political liberalization, the gains from what would become economic decentralization and political decentralization.

In fact, what we see today is because there wasn't much formal power given in economic decentralization that as technology has grown, as direct benefit transfers have grown, chief ministers and the Prime Minister's Office have become much better at retrenching and taking power away from that kind of decentralization. The kinds of reforms that were required at the political level were those that were going to give certain kinds of formal fiscal powers to lower levels of government and even MLAs and MPs.

That would give them some deeper standing in policy and the ability to prevent this kind of retrenchment. The inability to do so has meant that as technology has grown the way that it has, as the capacity to brand and advertise for politicians have grown, you have extraordinary centralization taking place within political parties and political actors, which has erased a significant part of the gains that were made by political and economic decentralization.

What is one reform that India needs today?

I think when we look at the data, people are naturally troubled by the growth of the personal wealth of candidates who are running for office, MLAs and MPs, and the level of criminality. By criminality, I mean those who have pending cases against them. This has been written about in a number of recent academic texts. What I'd like to do is connect that to the problem of retrenchment and centralization that I talked about earlier.

We have a situation today where the MLA or the MP has very little opportunity to affect the policy of the country. There's no genuine devolution of power to these local political actors. On top of that, it's very, very unlikely that an MLA or an MP, even a sitting MLA or MP, is going to get renominated, let alone reelected, unlike, let's say, the United States or the West.

Now, what that means is that without electoral incentives, without the ability to develop policy expertise, what is the incentive for an MLA or an MP to be good or to invest in policy or to invest in the people? Increasingly, what we find is that MLAs and MPs are selected for characteristics that make them more likely to win, but they're also very likely to only serve for one term.

What makes you more likely to win? Have a good organization. That might be being a criminal, being very wealthy so you can finance your own campaign, but if you win the election, you have to recoup your investment. That creates huge levels of corruption, that creates sometimes very, very complicated blocking of local opposition.

If there was a way to, again, genuinely invest in lower-level actors, give formal responsibilities to lower-level political actors to invest in policy, to deliver economic benefits so that citizens and their direct representatives would build a link of accountability, then I think much of this could be mitigated.

Overnight, citizens would vote for MLAs and MPs on their ability to deliver and not simply to chief ministers and prime ministers. You would see this extraordinary growth in the wealth and criminality of politicians diminish to a great extent.