It has now been nearly two years since Ashoka Mody published India Is Broken. In his book, Mody – formerly a deputy director at the International Monetary Fund and a visiting professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs – paints a searing portrait of India’s political and economic performance since 1947. This is a dystopian “India story”: a broken political system; a decayed moral and social fabric; squandered human capital; and an economy that continues to underperform despite hype, boosterism, and publicity.
What has changed in the last two years? In this episode of Past Imperfect, Mody brings his story up to date, and he remains pessimistic. As he has written in a new forward to his book, recently published in two parts (here and here) in Scroll, India is now “more broken.” Despite the setback to Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party in the recent general election, political norms have not changed, and the Opposition is as clueless as the ruling coalition about solving India’s endemic social and economic problems.
India is Broken is, above all, a history of joblessness. Mody departs from other accounts of India’s recent economic trajectory which have bullishly focused on GDP growth. Instead, he examines Indian policymakers’ woeful track record of producing enough quality jobs for their citizens. After 1947, “Indian leaders and policymakers had one task above all: to create jobs for vast numbers of people”. They failed abysmally, and they continue to do so. Data about GDP growth, Mody insists, is not only misleading. It is also fudged.
Despite fanfare about India’s demographic dividend, and despite rosy predictions of India’s manufacturing potential, the country remains mired in a deep employment crisis. “Let it sink in,” he now writes. “At least half a billion Indians are without adequate work.” Around 300 million Indians, he estimates, do not currently work and are not looking for work. An additional 200 million people are underemployed. Dramatic incidents, such as stampedes of thousands of desperate applicants for a handful of government jobs, neatly illustrate Mody’s point.
What explains this situation? Mody is now even more insistent that India has categorically refused to learn lessons from the economic growth of its neighbors: that quality education and gender equality are prerequisites for meaningful job creation. India has had a woeful record of delivery of public goods: things like elementary and secondary schooling, public health, conditions for women’s safety, good public transportation, and the fostering of a clean environment. Without these prerequisites, it will be impossible to train an Indian workforce which can compete with the likes of China, Vietnam, or even Bangladesh.
While India has recently achieved near universal child enrollment in schools, the quality of such schooling remains dreadful, with only tiny fractions of those students possessing basic reading and arithmetic skills. How, Mody asks, are Indians to compete with young Chinese or Vietnamese, who have benefited from decades of state investment in education and health? Why would foreign manufacturers invest in India when they can find more skilled and productive workers in Mexico?
Solutions will not be easy. Mody waives away the current fad of technological quick-fixes, pointing out that promotion of Indian human capital requires much more deep, sustained, and long-term policies, such as properly training teachers, combating patriarchal prejudices against women in the workforce, and creating an environment of accountability. But Indian politicians have little incentive embark upon such policies: they are increasingly embedded in criminal networks and beholden to a system of access politics, where they control the distribution of services for political gain. The ethos of Hindutva has only further entrenched patriarchal attitudes.
Decentralisation, Mody believes, offers India perhaps its best chance of achieving meaningful political change. He points to Kerala’s track record of health and educational achievements – and, moreover, a culture of strong citizen participation and involvement in the southwestern state. Yet, in this episode, Mody acknowledges significant problems with the Kerala model, such as rampant environmental destruction.
Fixing India will be difficult: Mody sees the current political and economic malaise as being decades in the making. Solutions will depend, above all, on getting the basics right, prioritising things like education, public health, and gender equality. No developed and industrialised society, Mody concludes, has ever been created without those essential building blocks in place.
