16

India
Kaushik Basu

1. Myrdal and India

My first encounter with Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama was a year after its
­publication. I joined Delhi University’s St. Stephen’s College as an undergraduate
in 1969. One of our professors, Kalyanjit Roy Choudhury, a voracious reader, told
us with excitement about this mammoth publication. Soon the book became a
fashion statement for students on our campus. To be seen crossing the college
yard with one of the volumes of the book raised one’s stature. To be seen talking
about it raised it even more. It was a case of good competition, which helped
enhance the level of erudition of my generation of students.
The publication of this three-volume magnum opus, focused on South Asia,
predominantly India, and more tangentially on several Southeast Asian nations,
marked a turning point for all those engaged in the study of economic history,
political economy, and development. Treating the region as focus, Myrdal ranged
over economics, history, and politics. What Myrdal was attempting, admittedly
in an inchoate way, was an early precursor of both new institutional economics
and behavioural economics, by insisting that to understand the performance of
­economies, we have to view economics as a discipline embedded in sociology,
­psychology, and politics.
Because Myrdal was charting such a new course, Asian Drama was both
­pioneering and flawed, as we now know with the hindsight of contemporary
research. We can see these twin traits in his analysis of India’s economy. In look-
ing at India’s sluggish growth and the vast numbers living in extreme poverty,
Myrdal often allowed his pessimism to show through. As he wrote,
If in a country like India the government were really determined to change the
prevailing attitudes and institutions, and had the courage to take the necessary
steps and accept the consequences, then these would include the effective aboli-
tion of caste, prescribed by the constitution, [. . .] land reform and tenancy legis-
lation, [. . .] the eradication of corruption at all levels [. . .] and so on.
(Myrdal 1968: 368)1

1 All page references to Asian Drama are to the widely used 1972 version edited by Seth King and
published by Allen Lane.

Kaushik Basu, India. In: Asian Transformations: An Inquiry into the Development of Nations.
Edited by Deepak Nayyar, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198844938.003.0016
402 Asian Transformations

One senses in this a pessimism that stems from frustration with a newly independ-
ent nation he wishes would succeed. The remark, however, suggests an inadequate
understanding of the complexity of interaction between economics and politics and
the troublesome idea of the endogeneity of institutions. His questioning ‘If [. . .]
the government were really determined’ and suggestion that the ‘abolition of caste’
and ‘eradication of corruption’ are matters of choice by the government reveals a
rather simplistic view of government as an exogenous institution.
It is not clear that governments have within their wherewithal the ability to
control many of the social ills like discrimination and corruption. The persistence
of these ills is not necessarily evidence of political leaders condoning them, even
though it often is. We have to use more sophisticated analysis to separate out the
cases where the corruption is being condoned or even encouraged, and where it is
being haplessly suffered because its mitigation is beyond the leader’s reach or any
individual’s reach for that matter. Many of our worst social ills are collective traps.
While Myrdal deserves credit for venturing out to some of these, rather treach-
erous, multidisciplinary terrains so early, the social sciences at that time did not
have the tools and theoretical constructs to do justice to such interdisciplinary
trespassing. As a consequence, we can now share the concern that Myrdal had for
the theatre of Asia and at the same time bring some of the more contemporary,
multidisciplinary social science methods to bear on the project. That is what
I attempt to do in this chapter.
India is today a changed country from what it was half a century ago. It still has
huge challenges but the country has long since broken with the ‘Hindu rate of
growth’, and its population below the poverty line has fallen steadily since the late
1960s, and sharply over the last decade. One way of celebrating Asian Drama is to
take stock of what India has done since the time of its publication in 1968 and
peer into the future and at the challenges that lie ahead, and that is what I propose
to do in this chapter.

2. Politics First

From the vantage point of hindsight, it seems quite remarkable that India did
what no other newly independent developing country did. It invested in politics
first—establishing democracy, free speech, independent media, and equal rights
for all citizens. At one level all progressive leaders around the world tried this.
Following the end of the Second World War, as nations broke from the yoke of
imperialism and became independent, we had not just Jawaharlal Nehru in India,
but Sukarno in Indonesia, Jinnah in Pakistan, Nkrumah in Ghana, Nyerere in
Tanzania, and several other leaders trying to put their nation on an even keel
politically, and build political institutions to promote inclusive economic devel-
opment. But in most cases it did not last. Coups, chaotic responses, and the lust
 Kaushik Basu 403

for power caused democracy to collapse in one nation after another, bringing in
military rule and conflict. A map of democracy around the world in 1985 would
show a bleak landscape in virtually all developing and emerging nations. India
was the exception.
While a large part of the credit for this does go to the early political leaders—
Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru, and Ambedkar, and to progressive writers and intellec-
tuals like Rabindranath Tagore, Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy, and Sarojini Naidu—as
in all matters of history, luck also plays a role. And India had it in ample measure.
In any case, the upshot was that in terms of political design and structure, with
regular elections, a progressive constitution, secularism, free media, and an
empowered supreme court, India resembled an advanced nation, and in this
respect had very few peers in the developing world.2
India’s downside turned out to be its economy. With growth sluggish, large
swathes of population living in poverty, and widespread illiteracy, the country
trudged along for decades, while several other nations, like South Korea, Taiwan,
Singapore, and Hong Kong, starting from roughly the same level of economic
prosperity in the 1950s, took off in spectacular ways. Some would argue that this
sluggishness was in part caused by India’s democracy and progressive politics, and
that, if there were a dictator, he or she would have pulled the economy out of
the vicious circle. I shall comment on this later. But whether or not this causal
­explanation from politics to economics has any merit, two facts do stand out:
early India’s remarkable political achievements and the persistent economic stag-
nation for at least three decades after its independence.
Two caveats to the above claim ought to be made. First, the description should
not convey the impression of nothing happening during these first decades.
Despite the overall growth remaining subdued at around 3.5 per cent per annum,
much was happening beneath that. Taking a page out of the Soviet model, India
tried to institute five-year planning, with an effort to set up heavy industries,
large-scale steel production, and building dams to generate electricity on a large
scale. Second, somewhere in the mid-1960s, India had a successful ‘green revo-
lution’ and broke out of the trap of low agricultural productivity and frequent
famines. Though this was most visible in Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar
Pradesh, its benefits were felt across the nation.
The second caveat is that the slow growth of the early years should not be taken
as an indicator of the nation’s independence not having an impact on the econ-
omy. Independence was good for India. Sivasubramonian’s (2000) comprehensive
statistical study shows that annual growth, from being negligible during the first
fifty years of the twentieth century, moved up to somewhere between 3 and 3.5
per cent in the decades immediately after the country’s independence in 1947.

2 For discussion, see Sen (2004, 2005) and Basu (2009). For one of the most authoritative studies of
the interface between politics and economics in India, see Bardhan (1998).
404 Asian Transformations

Nayyar (2006) identifies 1951 and 1980 as the two turning points in India’s growth
in the twentieth century. I will have occasion to dispute his second turning point
but that will come later.
There would be a short interruption in democracy in 1975, when the Prime
Minister, Indira Gandhi, declared an emergency and took dictatorial control over
the nation. For those who believe dictatorship helps economic growth, the emer-
gency seemed like a godsend because, in 1975/76, India’s GDP growth rate hit 9 per
cent, an unimaginable figure at that time (and, it is also believed, the trains ran on
time). However, if these hardliners studied the growth trend thereafter, they would
be deflated. Growth declined and, by 1979/80, it had plummeted to –5.2 per cent, the
worst year in India’s history from 1947 to now.3 In fact, after that year, India has not
had a single year of negative GDP growth, though it grazed past it in the early 1990s.
Luckily, the emergency lasted just under two years and, unlike most dictator-
ships, it was brought to an end by an election, called by Indira Gandhi herself, in
1977, when she was roundly defeated. It remains a mystery why she behaved so
differently from other dictators—namely, calling an election and then not rigging it.
One theory, to which I subscribe, is that she was troubled by the fact of having
destroyed her father’s legacy of establishing a vibrant democracy in India and
wanted the legitimacy of an election and was prepared to lose.4 The other hypoth-
esis is hubris, namely, that she was confident that, though the opposition and
much of the media cried foul, she would win and then she would consolidate her
power. In any case, fortunately for all supporters of democracy, she was defeated.
When Indira Gandhi returned to power in the 1980s, India’s policies began to
change. I would argue that, unlike her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, she did not have
an innate economic ideology. While she had strong political convictions, on
matters of economics, she had few deep convictions. When it came to economic
policy, her career can be broken into two parts—the first when she was her father’s
daughter, driven largely by Nehru’s ideology, and the second when she was her
sons’ mother, steered largely by her sons’ convictions.
In her early years as leader, Indira Gandhi was largely her father’s daughter and
she did what Nehru would have done. Nehru’s own ideology was broadly Fabian
socialist, with an instinctive internationalism. As he wrote to Amiya Chakravarty
in a letter dated 29 November 1935, ‘I have far more in common with English and
other non-Indian socialists than I have with non-socialists in India’. And later,
when he was prime minister, he had joked with the US Ambassador to India,
John Kenneth Galbraith, that, to understand India, Galbraith ought to realize that

3 As this topic has been so much in the news since the demonetization of 8 November 2016,
I should point out that the only other time demonetization was tried in independent India was in 1978,
when Morarji Desai was prime minister. This was before the year when growth plummeted in a way
not seen since India’s independence.
4 This is the view taken by Pranab Mukherjee, who was close to Indira Gandhi and would later
become president of India. (I know this from my personal conversation with Mr Mukherjee).
 Kaushik Basu 405

Nehru was ‘the last Englishman to be ruling over India’. His socialist instinct—the
belief that there should be vastly greater equality of income and wealth—was
genuine. Commenting on what differentiates Western and Indian political thinking,
Myrdal had written, ‘Another fact is South Asia’s commitment to egalitarianism,
which is an integral part of their ideology of planning’ (Myrdal 1968: 120). Despite
this, Nehru balked at the centralization of power that he saw in China and the
Soviet Union.
Questions remain about whether these two instincts are compatible. In the
end, the form of socialism India followed is best described as state capitalism. A
few large public sector firms and banks were established; there were lots of private
firms and enterprises, with some polarization between the very large and very
small (with a missing middle); the state tried to command and direct from the
top; and, finally, all this was wrapped up in a profuse rhetoric of socialism. It is
interesting to note that Myrdal (1968) himself had toiled to make sense of India’s
‘socialism’ and observed how this involved a certain amount of ‘verbal jugglery’.
The evidence for this comes from the fact of enormous income and wealth
­inequality that prevails in India (see, for instance, Bardhan 2007). Some observers
of India’s political economy have argued that, despite this rhetoric, in practice,
India drifted to ‘neo-liberalism’ (Kohli 2012).
This is an important observation. India never practised socialism in the sense
of having a centralized ownership of the means of production in the hands of the
state, though using the term socialism had become mandatory in all government
documents and declarations pertaining to the economy, well into the 1990s. What
India meant by the term socialism (and pursued that, too, without much success)
was a kind of welfare state, in which there would be support for the poor in terms
of healthcare, education, and basic food. But even this was more often present in
writings emerging from the government than in actual action. In terms of the
government owning the means of production, India was nowhere near a social-
ist state: India had roughly 14 per cent of GDP coming from state-owned enter-
prises, whereas for China this was 40 per cent. These data are not easy to compute
and there is indeed a big margin for error (see Basu 2009) but the large difference
is significant.
In her early years, Indira Gandhi pursued a policy similar to that of Nehru, the
nationalization of banks in 1969 being the most aggressive move along those
lines. By the time she returned to power in the 1980s, three years after her
electoral defeat in 1977, her strategy had shifted, this time under the influence of,
primarily, her younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, and later under the influence of Rajiv
Gandhi, which would have large implications for India’s economic trajectory, the
story of the next section.
Indira Gandhi also had deep influences on India’s politics and the nature of the
state. Even leaving aside the emergency, she had centralized power, often in her
own hands, much more than Nehru. As Kothari (1977) argued, this in turn
406 Asian Transformations

tended to take away power and initiative from the grass-roots level, and resulted
in a centralization of power that Nehru had resisted. According to Kothari (though
there is scope to contest his view), this had a negative effect on economic growth.
Similar issues arise in evaluating India’s democracy. Thanks to the adoption of
the principle of ‘one person, one vote’, independent India established representa-
tive government right from the start, but questions remain about how ‘responsive’
India’s ‘representative’ state is. In a compelling essay, Mehta (2012) examines these
questions. Echoing Myrdal’s view that distant histories can have deep influences
on the nature of contemporary politics and institutions, Mehta points to the social
inequalities that go far back into Indian history, having legacy effects on the
nature of democracy.
One of the most major historical sources of social inequality in India is its caste
system. While in itself caste is a deplorable inheritance and, at least in speech,
most founding political leaders of India spoke out against it, it has been argued by
some that the castes have played a role in nurturing India’s democracy by provid-
ing focal points of coalition and political mobilization for disadvantaged groups
(see Varshney 2013). What complicates the story is that many of these caste iden-
tities are local and regional, which has thwarted mobilization across the nation—
an outcome that has both its plusses and minuses.
It must also be recorded that the nature of India’s politics has changed much
since the mid-1970s. The domination of a few big parties and in particular the
Congress has diminished vastly. Regional parties have sprung up all over the
nation and India has seen the rise of coalition politics also on the national stage,
as parties have had to reach out to others to make sure they have the majority
necessary to form a government. This has put a new set of brakes and challenges
on policy experimentation, and, at the same time, brought a certain agility to
politics, as all parties that matter have had to master the art of accommodation
and compromise.
One major shift in the trajectory of India’s political economy is the arrival of
‘coalition politics’ in the late eighties. Though there was a short period of coalition
governance immediately after the emergency, the paradigmatic shift to coalition
politics began in 1989. This did create new strains. As Nayyar (1998) argued,
there was an ‘absence of consensus’ rarely seen earlier. But this also created a kind
of stability whereby the nation learned not to destabilize economic policy every
time there was a shift in power at the nation’s helm. Indeed, despite all these
­caveats, despite the two-year retreat from 1975 to 1977 caused by the emergency,
and despite its complicated and many-splendoured manifestation, democratic
stability is a remarkable achievement for India. While research and activism must
persist in analysing and correcting the weaknesses of India’s democracy, it needs
to be appreciated that this, like good infrastructure, is an institutional and political
investment for stable economic policy that modern India has inherited and it
would be folly to damage it just when the nation has reached a stage to take
 Kaushik Basu 407

advantage of and build on it to power its economy, promote development, and

even step up the GDP growth rate.
While this is not the central concern of this chapter, the political story that
I have laid out in this section is of considerable relevance. There is a small but
undeniable build-up of opinion in India that is questioning the value of India’s early
commitment to cultural and political openness, secularism, and commitment to
freedom of speech, for the media and also for individuals—from university cam-
puses to the street-corner coffee house. It is regrettable that there are now forces that
would like to reverse this. I believe that democracy, cultural openness, and secular-
ism are traits that make for a better society and also more growth, at least of a
sustainable kind. Whether or not India’s early investment in this kind of politics was
the right choice at that time (I believe it was but am aware that this is not beyond
contestation), to squander this social and political capital just as the economy is
taking off would be a mistake of enormous proportions, akin to making early invest-
ment in large ports, roadways, and railways, and then deciding not to use them.

3. India’s Economic Trajectory Since Independence

In a project commemorating Myrdal’s Asian Drama there should be no need to

remind the reader that economic growth does not occur solely because of good
economics, but is due to many other factors that lie beyond economics (see
Chapters 3 and 13, this volume). Growth is the outcome of various factors, from
the nature of institutions, the prevalent social norms, and the positioning of the
nation in the global polity, to the nature of economic policy. Some of the drivers
of growth are beyond the control of any individual or organization. But there are
also drivers that can be controlled by citizens and government. The purpose of
economic analysis is to identify these.
What marks India’s economic history since the nation’s independence is the
relative lack of drama, compared to other Asian countries. Barring the growth
spike in 1975, mentioned above, India chugged along at a steady rate, of around
3.5 per cent per annum, for the first three decades. Given that population was
initially growing at over 2 per cent per annum, this meant a growth of barely
1 per cent for per capita income. Table 16.1 summarizes the essential numbers.
Annual GDP growth rate, averaged over decades, shows India growing at
3.91 per cent, 3.68 per cent, and 3.09 per cent over the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s,
respectively. In decadal terms, the big break was in the 1980s, when the growth
breached the 5 per cent mark for the first time.
I believe this initial sluggishness was, in part, a consequence of the nature of
Indian politics. Democracy with a vibrant media and regular elections makes
governments wary of policy experiments, because the politicians are likely to be
out of office if the policies backfire. So what Park Chung Hi could do in South
408 Asian Transformations

Table 16.1 India’s growth and investment rates

Year Annual GDP Investment Savings

growth rate rate rate
1951–61 3.91 11.82 –
1961–71 3.68 14.71 9.03
1971–81 3.09 17.86 12.96
1981–91 5.38 21.04 17.32
1991–2001 5.71 24.14 24.27
2001–11 7.68 32.44 31.42
2011–18 6.61 35.78 31.17

Source: Economic Survey 2017–2018, Government of India, 2018.

Korea, or Mao Zedong could in China, or Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore was not
feasible for leaders in India’s democratic setting.5
All this is well reflected in the anecdotes of history and comparative statistics.
In the 1950s, South Korea and India were almost equally poor and, in fact, most
advanced nations treated South Korea as the basket case that would need support
and aid to prevent major suffering but there was not much hope of a growth surge,
whereas India was treated as ready to take off. However, Park Chung Hi took
commanding control of the economy, took some daring policy decisions, some of
which backfired massively and had to be retracted (see Krueger 1998). However,
and maybe because of this policy agility, the economy stumbled a few times but
also grew at a remarkable clip. South Koreans are now a little more than seven-
teen times as rich as Indians, in per capita income terms, which shows what a
combination of good policies and institutions can do.
Turning to China, in contrast to India, we find it, all the way up to 1976,
­experiencing fluctuations in growth that would have been unimaginable, and also
intolerable, in India. The broad picture of India’s growth, captured in Table 16.1
reflects this relative tranquillity, which is in sharp contrast to China. In 1961,
following the Great Leap Forward and the famine it unleashed—arguably the
biggest famine in world history—China had a negative growth of 27 per cent.
That is, more than a quarter of its GDP disappeared.
The Cultural Revolution would again result in a drop in growth much greater
than India ever saw. On the other hand, China had several years of double digit
growth during the 1960s and 1970s. Until the arrival of Deng Xiaoping, the most
notable feature of China’s economy was not how high or how low growth was, but
the fluctuations in growth. This would change in the early 1980s, when China would
move to a sustained high-growth path over a thirty-year period. When the Latin
American crisis of 1982 happened, caused by the huge international debt build-up, it

5 Lest this misleads the reader, I should add that just as China, Singapore, and South Korea are
examples of authoritarian control and high-growth coinciding, there are many more examples of
nations with totalitarian control at the helm and low growth and devastated economies.
 Kaushik Basu 409

had a negligible effect on China, which was by then on a fairly steady 10 per cent per
annum growth path. China’s growth is gradually slowing down now, currently
just below 7 per cent per annum, but that is probably a reflection of the economy’s
maturity. It is beginning to look like a proper upper-middle-income nation.
For India, in contrast to China—barring relatively small dips in 1957–1958 and
1965–1966, and a very occasional 8 per cent growth and one year of 9 per cent
growth (in 1975–1976)—the trajectory remained quite uneventful for the first
three decades after Independence. Growth picked up through the 1980s as a
changed Indira Gandhi tried to free up markets and ease controls, which were
beginning to smother the country’s growth. But by the end of the 1980s, more
than anything else, it was fiscal laxity that helped India grow faster and also set
the stage for the big crisis of 1990–1991, when the first Gulf War precipitated a
massive slowdown and a balance of payments crisis for India.
This is where there is scope for some debate on whether the growth pick-up
that India saw in the early 1980s can be described as a turning point, as Nayyar
(2006) called it. Rodrik and Subramaniam (2004b) take a similar view, pointing
to an ‘attitudinal shift’ in the government in the 1980s. At one level, this is a
semantic controversy. It is indeed true that while in a pure comparison of numbers
in terms of decadal growth, as captured in Table 16.1, where the broad direction
of India’s growth is upward, there is indeed a sharp rise in growth between the
1970s and 1980s.
There were some important policy drivers behind the growth pick-up, includ-
ing Indira Gandhi’s small steps towards liberalization, but there was, at least from
the mid-1980s, also some short-termism, in terms of fiscal fuelling, which contrib-
uted to the growth but also to the economic crisis of 1990–1991. The p ­ roximate
cause of the crisis was the first Gulf War, which put a sudden stop to the inflow of
foreign exchange to India. At that time, the main inflow of foreign exchange was
from remittances sent by Indian workers in the Gulf countries. The Iraqi invasion
of Kuwait and the subsequent crisis put a virtual halt to this. One reason why
this spun into an even bigger crisis than need have been the case was the growing
fiscal burden of the previous years.
The crisis of the 1990s enabled India to do what China had been able to do in
the 1960s and 1970s, and South Korea in the 1970s—experiment with policy shifts
and reforms, and the rewards were visible. The economic reforms of 1991–1993
in India have been analysed extensively (see Nayyar 1996; Ahluwalia 2002;
Mohan 2002). They caused many changes, most notably in India’s international
sector, best captured by India’s foreign exchange reserves, which increased expo-
nentially after 1993. There was also the removal of India’s notorious licensing
system, which drew attention to the larger subject of the costs of doing business,
which in India were (and still are) very high. I shall return to this later.
In India, since foreign exchange reserves used to be so low, it had become
standard wisdom that people and corporations should not be allowed to take for-
eign exchange out of the country. What this wisdom missed out on was the fact
410 Asian Transformations

that if you do not allow people to take their foreign currency out of the country,
they will not bring their foreign currency into the country in the first place.
Hence, it is likely that one reason India had so little foreign reserve is that there
were such severe restrictions on taking foreign money out of the country. This
was changed during the reforms of 1991–1993 and the results were visible within
three or four years.
Of course, at the time of such a policy shift there is a risk of crisis, because
once the restrictions to take foreign exchange out are lifted, the first instinct of
people will be to take their foreign reserves out and this can cause a sudden bal-
ance of payments crisis. India reached out to the IMF for support at the time of
the reforms, to ensure that there would be a backup in the event of a sudden cur-
rency haemorrhage. Once that immediate risk of crisis was overcome, the benefits
were visible. The country’s foreign exchange reserves began to rise exponentially
from the mid-1990s and the level that used to hold steady roughly at US$5 billion
now stands at over US$400 billion.
The nation’s growth rate also picked up from 1994, and hovered between
annual rates of 6–8 per cent, with a small drop in and after 1997, almost certainly
caused by the East Asian crisis. The growth rate picked up once again in 2003 and
from 2005 it was at a level of over 9 per cent for three consecutive years, for the
first time drawing comparisons with China’s.
Such major shifts have many precursors and I would be remiss not to mention
some less dramatic but important changes that began in the late 1960s and played
an important role in preparing the ground for India’s later high growth. I do believe
that the early political investments of Nehru that I have already referred to played an
important role in the long-run strength of the Indian economy. Turning to economic
policy, the most important story was that of savings and investment. On these
dimensions India today resembles East Asian economies, with savings and invest-
ment rates somewhere between 30 and 40 per cent. But this was not always the case.
What arguably gave a boost to savings and investment was the controversial
move to nationalize all banks in 1969. This may have had other negative effects
but one consequence of this was a sharp rise in the number of bank branches in
relatively remote rural areas (a consequence of a directive from the government
to the banks). This made it easier for people to save money, and through the 1970s
there was an unprecedented rise in India’s savings rate (Basu and Maertens 2008).
A comprehensive study by Athukorala and Sen (2004) confirmed that the ‘spread
of banking facilities’ played a positive role in India in promoting savings. What
India saw subsequently was a most unusual growth pattern for a developing
country. It was not the manufacturing sector that led India’s growth but the ser-
vices sector (Murthy 2005; Nayyar 2012; Basu 2015). Over the next fifteen years
India topped the chart of nations in terms of service sector growth and this was
primarily because of the information technology sector, in which the country
excelled, but there is more to the story.
 Kaushik Basu 411

The growth story of India’s services sector is an outlier. It has been argued
that the services sector growth tends to occur in two waves, one which takes an
economy from the low- to middle-income category, and a second one which
occurs in middle-income economies, giving them a further boost (Eichengreen
and Gupta 2009). The first consists of various informal sectors growing rapidly,
whereas the second gets its boost from more sophisticated sectors, such as infor-
mation technology and finance, triggering the overall service sector growth. It is
this second-stage services sector growth that happened in India, rather early and
with a vigour rarely seen anywhere else. As Nayyar’s (2012) estimation shows,
between 1980 and 2009 India’s service sector growth was so large that it picked up
85 per cent of the decline in share of agriculture. That the share of agriculture will
decline in the process of development is normal. What this statistic shows is both
the remarkably good performance of India’s service sector and the remarkably
poor performance of India’s manufacturing sector.
The factors that drove India’s success in the service sector are several and make
for interesting economic analysis. First, there was an early policy shift that was
rooted in politics but had an unintended, beneficial effect. This had to do with the
computing sector. Following a spat with IBM in 1977, India asked the company to
leave the country. This caused big disruptions to the computing sector in India,
but it also became an inadvertent application of the infant industry argument,
whereby India was forced to make its own innovations and advances in this sector
(Murthy 2005). This prepared the initial ground and then, when the economic
reform of 1991–1993 happened, India’s information technology sector was ready
for take-off. As has been emphasized by Murthy (2004), the reforms were c­ ritically
important because they cut down government bureaucracy and enabled speed in
a sector that depends on that.
I have argued in Basu (2015) that two of India’s big stumbling blocks, a cum-
bersome bureaucracy and poor infrastructure, explain a significant part of both
its success in the services sector and stagnation in the manufacturing sector.
The manufacturing sector, which needs to transport its products over roads and
use the nation’s ports to ship goods out for global sales, and has to negotiate the
bureaucracy to pay taxes and get permits, was naturally stunted. The services sec-
tor, and in particular IT products, on the other hand, was initially largely tax
exempted and so did not have to interact much with the bureaucracy. Further, its
outputs did not, for the most part, have to be carted across roads or negotiate
ports since they could be digitally sent to the user. Hence, this sector could bypass
the nation’s two big stumbling blocks.
Another interesting connection, which fits so well with the kinds of concern
that Gunnar Myrdal had, is between democracy and service sector growth.
Eichengreen and Gupta (2009) argue that the second wave of service sector
growth has a connection with democracy, with more vibrant democracies having
an advantage. They create an ethos of openness and connectivity that are crucial
412 Asian Transformations

to this sector. One obvious factor is Internet connectivity. Many nations with
severe top-down state control place restrictions on digital connectivity to thwart
dissent and the amassing of popular opinion. Fortunately, India had the advan-
tage of a democratic system, and it is arguable that this played a significant role in
the success of its service sector.
This pattern of growth, coupled with India’s over-production of engineers
through from the 1960s to the 1980s, had a political fallout. As Silicon Valley took
off in the USA and there was a growing need of expertise there, India became the
main partner of the USA in this segment of the economy. This caused a warming
of relations between the USA and India, which had hit rock bottom at the time of
Bangladesh’s independence in 1971 when Indira Gandhi refused to toe Nixon’s
line. This political development has been of great help to both the United States
and India, with FDI flowing in both directions between the two countries and
greater geopolitical co-operation between them. With Indians getting more than
50 per cent of the H1B visas, which is the category meant for professionals, that
the USA issues, these links have continued to grow.
All these drivers had fallen into place by the early years of this millennium and,
by 2003, India seemed to have moved another step up the growth ladder. In
2003–2004, India’s GDP grew by 8 per cent and then from 2005 to 2008 it grew at
over 9 per cent for three consecutive years. It is likely that India has moved up to a
higher growth path, even though there have been some trying years subsequently.
Immediately after 2008, the great global recession had its effect on India. After
2010, some major corruption scandals rocked the entire economy and in 2016 an
ill-conceived demonetization put the brakes on the economy. It is, however, argu-
able that India is now on a higher growth path overall, despite these occasional
interruptions.
To complete the picture of how India has developed overall, it is important to
look at other indicators of progress—literacy, poverty, inequality, and health. The
story here has been less encouraging. For a nation committed to equality and
socialism, India did surprisingly poorly on these important indicators. Literacy
is a striking example. In higher education, India did remarkably well for a devel-
oping economy (though it has, of late, been losing rank).6 We could see this from
the large presence of Indians in international gatherings of science, engineering,
and other areas of higher learning and research. Yet, in terms of basic literacy, it
trailed behind much poorer nations. In 1961, India’s adult literacy was 28 per
cent and life expectancy at birth was 28 years. These improved slowly till 1991
when the figures were, respectively, 52 per cent and 58 years. Thereafter there
was some pick-up and latest available numbers (for 2011) are literacy 74 per cent
and life expectancy 67 years.

6 See Agarwal (2009); Patra et al. (2017).

 Kaushik Basu 413

Given that it is easier to make progress on a low base, the performance was
very disappointing up to 1991. It is also worth noting that there is a great deal of
variance across the country, with two states—Kerala and Mizoram—having over
90 per cent adult literacy, whereas in several states it is barely above 60 per cent.
These figures hide large gender differences in most parts of India. There is only
one state where female literacy is over 90 per cent. This is Kerala. At the other
end, there are states with abysmally low female literacy, such as Rajasthan (52.7
per cent) and Bihar (53.3 per cent).
The above numbers are symptomatic of other social indicators, like poverty,
health, and malnutrition. India’s poverty rates, using the simple headcount ratio,
have also been declining. In 1977 there were 60 per cent and 87 per cent of the
population living on less than US$1.90 and US$3.20 dollars a day, respectively.
There was a sharp fall after 2009, but with over 20 per cent of the population liv-
ing on less than US$1.90 and 60 per cent living on US$3.20, there is still a great
distance to go.
Finally, a comment on inequality. The numbers here are dismaying and reveal
what was discussed earlier in this chapter, namely, that socialism in India was
mainly a rhetorical exercise. The measurement of inequality is, of course, a vexing
problem, the classic work being that of Sen (1977).7 The Gini coefficient of income
or consumption inequality is high but there are other measures, based on wealth
and the tracking of the difference between the super-rich and the median person,
which shows very high and worsening inequality (Bardhan 2007; Mishra 2012),
which is likely to have negative spillovers in the long-run, and maybe not that
long. The numbers on poverty quoted above, in a nation that now has several
individuals listed among the world’s wealthiest individuals, tell us that India does
have work to do in reversing some of these inequality trends.

4. Contemporary Challenges

While India’s growth picked up in the last few decades, and especially since 2005,
as just discussed, India still faces formidable challenges—of deep-seated poverty,
endemic corruption, growing inequality, and other anxieties of early growth.
How should the nation deal with these hurdles? How should India turn the march
of technology that is happening around the world, and creating turmoil in so
many places, to its advantage? How should it attend to the disquiet of the disen-
franchised class, a necessary concomitant of high inequality? The aim in this sec-
tion is not to be even-handed but to comment on four special areas, where India
has work to do and on which I have comments on offer.

7 For an excellent short summary of the numbers and also the challenge of measurement in the
context of India, see Mishra (2012).
414 Asian Transformations

4.1 Bureaucratic Costs

In India, the cost of transactions with the bureaucracy is too high. This curbs
enterprise and handicaps small businesses, which cannot afford to operate large
legal departments to deal with government sanctions and permits. India’s disad-
vantage in this is caught well by the World Bank’s Doing Business indicator.
Among the 190 countries studied by the World Bank, India currently has a rank
of 100 in terms of the ‘ease of doing business’, where rank 1 indicates an economy
with the least bureaucratic inefficiency.
A snapshot of how India performs in comparison with a group of Asian
­economies in terms of select indicators is dismaying. Consider, for instance, the
number of days it takes to get the basic permits to start a small enterprise. In
Singapore it is 3 days, in South Korea 4, in Bangladesh 20, and in India 30. An
enterprise pondering whether to start a new business venture will surely consider
how difficult it would be to close and exit, should the business fail. For this rea-
son, one of the ten indicators that make up the overall ease of doing business is
the time it takes to resolve insolvency and close down a firm. The data on this are
quite remarkable. Resolving insolvency in Singapore takes 9 months, in Malaysia
1 year, in South Korea 1.5 years, and in India 4 years and 3 months. The story is
similar for the time required to enforce a contract and the time needed to obtain
export clearance and customs clearance for imports. In the light of all this, it is
not hard to understand why India’s manufacturing sector has failed to take off.
In moving on I should make three warnings. First, in reality there are thou-
sands of dimensions to measuring a business environment. The aim must not be
to target the World Bank’s indicators and work specifically on them. Yet there is a
tendency in contemporary India to do just that, because the Doing Business
ranking has suddenly become a visible and much talked about indicator. That can
move a nation up the World Bank’s chart and yet miss the substantive improve-
ments the indicators are supposed to approximate. Second, it is important to
remember that ease of doing business is not the same as overall welfare. It would
be foolhardy to concentrate on ease of doing business to the exclusion of other
measures of a nation’s welfare. One important dimension of human life is how
difficult or easy it is for ordinary people to interact with the government. How
easy is it to get a driving licence, to pay one’s electricity bills, or to file an income
tax return? Doing Business measures the ease of business groups’ interaction with
the state, but there is also a need for a measure that captures ordinary people’s
ease of interaction with the state. Such a ‘living life’ index would capture an
important dimension of economic life alongside what is measured by the Doing
Business index.
Finally, the need to eliminate unnecessary hurdles must not be equated with a
call for doing away with regulation. No modern economy can run well or enhance
the well-being of its overall population if it is left entirely to the dictates of profit
 Kaushik Basu 415

making. We need regulation to direct the economy, and we certainly need laws
and controls to curb environmental damage. We cannot allow enterprises to
choke our rivers and lakes with plastic and chemicals on grounds of free-market
efficiency. But what has happened in India is a stacking-up of old and new rules,
many of which serve no purpose other than to slow down decision-making and
fuel corruption as people are forced to cajole and bribe those in authority to get
the necessary permissions.

4.2 Corruption Control

The above topic naturally leads us to the problem of endemic corruption, which
was a major concern of Myrdal. However, his emphasis was on the determination
of leaders as a potential remedy. While this may be of some importance, it may
not address the crux of the problem. At the same time, it would not be right to
treat corruption as inevitable, as some take it to be. Corruption can be curbed and
vastly diminished. But to do this needs analysis and careful reasoning, as much as
determination and grit on the part of leaders. The world has had leaders who
were deeply troubled by corruption and determined to end it in their nation,
and were themselves incorruptible, and yet failed. To understand this, we need to
dissect the problem carefully.
First, many observers make the mistake, looking at the corruption all around
them, of treating corruption as an inherent part of society. There are some pas-
sages in Kautilya’s Arthashasthra that have nurtured this belief. Consider this:
‘Just as it is impossible not to taste honey or the poison on the tip of the tongue,
so it is impossible for a Government servant not to eat up at least a part of the King’s
revenue.’ This beautiful imagery, characteristic of Kautilya, expresses a rather
pessimistic view, and nurtures a sense of helplessness in the face of corruption.
Fortunately, there is enough evidence now that corruption can be controlled.
There are developed countries in the world that had a high level of corruption
in the early nineteenth century. In Myrdal’s own country, Sweden, there was the
ubiquitous institution of the ‘sportler’, which was something between a tip and
a bribe, given to a bureaucrat to get some ‘job’ done. It is gone now. Today, the
Scandinavian and Nordic nations are among the least corrupt countries in the
world. There are examples of economies where corruption has gone down over an
even shorter period—a couple of decades. Singapore and Hong Kong are good
examples. According to Transparency International’s data, Singapore has less
corruption than the UK and USA; Hong Kong less than the USA.8
Much of the challenge of corruption control arises from unrealistic assump-
tions about the behaviour of the agents of the state. Once we recognize that they are

8 See https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2017#table.
416 Asian Transformations

human, with their own motivations and aims, we can attempt to draft appropriate
laws. This is essentially a problem of mechanism design. I shall stay away from
such micro issues here; I have discussed these at some length elsewhere, in the
context of controlling bribery (Basu 2015, 2018). I want instead to address here
one widespread challenge that arises in countries where corruption is endemic,
such as Brazil, India, and China. To put the problem in perspective, it may be
pointed out that these three countries have ranks of 96 (Brazil), 81 (India), and 77
(China) in terms of the perceived level of corruption among the 180 countries
analysed by Transparency International, the least corrupt country (which hap-
pens to be New Zealand) having a rank of 1 and the most corrupt (Somalia) a
rank of 180.
The problem I am referring to occurs when a leader has a surfeit of options
when it comes to deciding where to start cleaning up corruption. Consider a
nation where corruption is endemic. This can be because there is a natural self-
reinforcing element to corruption: If lots of people are corrupt, it seems fine
for you to be corrupt. And this logic can lead to a corruption trap (World
Bank 2015). There is also the problem of nations with a complex history of
law-making, such as India,9 where there has been such a build-up of layers of law
and custom that it is now virtually impossible to avoid violating the law. Debroy’s
(2000) estimate is that, between central government and the (29) state governments,
India has over 30,000 laws, a disproportionate number gathering dust. Therein
lies the problem.
Consider a leader in some such nation who is genuinely keen to put an end to
corruption. With corruption everywhere, the leader faces a choice of where to
start. She can pick anybody and find him guilty of some violation of the law. Now,
every political leader knows that if she wishes to survive politically it is best to
arrest not friends but those in the opposition. But once she begins to go after her
enemies it becomes clear that the anti-corruption policy itself is a handy instru-
ment to silence the opposition and to go after a press that is critical of her policies.
In other words, what begins as an anti-corruption policy becomes an instrument
of disciplining the opposition and the media. This is the danger that is faced by Xi
Jinping, by Narendra Modi, by Michel Temer. It is an important reason why cor-
ruption persists and why the persistence of corruption is not necessarily a sign of
the leader not being serious about removing corruption but simply a manifestation
of a political-economic trap in which nations tend to get caught. And India is
no exception.
One way for a leader, serious about crime control, to handle this is to set up
some broad parameters and hand over corruption control to an autonomous
authority, with the explicit commitment that, once this authority begins to func-
tion, it would have full autonomy, in the way a nation’s supreme court is supposed

9 For an elegant commentary on this history, see Roy and Swamy (2016).
 Kaushik Basu 417

to have. In Asia, Indonesia is the only country that has had some experience of
this kind of institution, though even it has run into problems recently.

4.3 Norms and Institutions

Turing to broader issues, the challenge of mitigating corruption entails thinking

of the state as an endogenous institution consisting of individuals with their own
objectives and motivations, as assumed in the literature on new institutional
economics, of which Myrdal’s work was clearly a precursor (see Evans 1995; Stiglitz
2017; Basu 2018). Such a perspective opens up new ways of thinking about the
law and how to control corruption.10 I want to discuss one that relates to social
norms and, more generally, sociology.11
In controlling corruption, the design of incentives with which economists have
been concerned matters, but the social and political setting is as important. This
is often missed by neoclassical economists, who treat social and cultural variables
as exogenous and redundant for the economy. In reality, we can try to eliminate
or modify cultural traits that have harmful consequences on the economy and
encourage the ones that aid efficiency and progress. And even though it is true
that, at this stage, we do not fully understand what causes norms to change, the
recognition that they do change and can potentially respond to policy is i­ mportant
and can help set up a useful research agenda. Second, even when our norms and
culture are fixed, knowing how they intertwine with economic variables e­ nables
us to think of new policy interventions and assess more accurately the costs and
benefits of interventions.
As illustration, consider the problem of teacher absenteeism in government-
run schools. A multi-country study in which researchers made surprise visits to
government-run primary schools shows that in terms of teacher truancy, India
is second only to Uganda (Kremer et al. 2004)—and by a short head. At any time,
25 per cent of teachers are found missing from government-run schools in India.
What should be done? In answering this, economists have typically looked to
economic variables. This can indeed be useful. Analysts have rightly stressed the
role of incentives and sanctions—both carrots and sticks—in creating greater
work discipline among the teachers. However, I believe that much of the problem
is rooted in culture and social norms. Economists assume that, once we cite cul-
ture, we are planning to do a disappearing act in a welter of words and vague
­generalities. That is not true. There is now an increasing body of knowledge that
is beginning to give shape and structure to these topics. For one, we know that
our behaviour is affected by echo chamber effects within groups and by notions of

10 See Basu (2011), Abbink et al. (2014), Berlin et al. (2017), and Mishra (2017).
11 For an innovative scheme of corruption control, which does not involve the government but
entails self-enforcing contracts among private sector firms and corporations, see Dixit (2015).
418 Asian Transformations

social stigma. It is otherwise hard to explain why, though teachers are paid the
same salary and subjected to the same rules of economic incentives and punish-
ments across the nation, teacher truancy in Jharkhand is about three times as
high as that in Maharashtra, as the Kremer et al. (2004) study shows. Our behav-
iour is often guided not by monetary considerations but by notions of dignity,
stigma, and self-respect.
In reality, unlike in the neoclassical model, people, including those indulging
in corruption, are aware of the moral dimensions of corruption. However, when
corruption is widespread, it may seem a more tolerable form of behaviour. It can
then be like an equilibrium-selection norm. As is pointed out in World Bank
(2015: 60), through much of history and in many contemporary societies, corrup-
tion is ‘a shared belief that using public office to benefit oneself and one’s family
and friends is widespread, expected and tolerated. In other words, corruption can
be a social norm.’
An interesting study by Abbink et al. (2014) checks this out by artificially cre-
ating the social norm in a laboratory setting, and measuring people’s behavioural
response.12 The study found that the probability of offering a bribe doubles when
the subject is paired with a more corrupt partner rather than a more honest part-
ner. The social setting influences individual behaviour. The moral quality of
leadership in society can make a difference. And there is now a large body of
­literature which outlines social and institutional interventions that can be as
powerful as economic incentives in changing some of these adverse behaviour
patterns in society.

4.4 Technology and Labour

Turning finally to the challenge of technology and labour, for India this is as yet a
problem in its early stages, but it may come to be the dominant problem in the
medium to long term. Worldwide and in high- and upper-middle-income coun-
tries the problem is acute. Thanks to the rise of two kinds of technology—the
‘labour-saving’ kind, which is leading to machines and robots replacing labour,
and the ‘labour-linking’ kind, which is allowing workers in low-wage nations to
do some of the work for rich economies without having to leave their shores—
there is a clear trend of wage shares falling and inequality rising.
The problem is affecting India (Kotwal 2017). Since the reforms to India’s
economy during 1991–1993, growth has been higher but job creation has
lagged behind growth quite significantly (Ghose 2016; Nayyar 2017). During
the real-high-growth period for India, 2005–2008, for instance, when GDP

12 See also Bicchieri and Xiao (2009) and Banerjee (2016).

 Kaushik Basu 419

was growing at roughly 9.5 per cent per annum, annual job creation was barely
2 per cent. I believe that this will become an inevitable problem once India
becomes a high-income or even an upper-middle-income economy, since it is
a global problem. However, there is no reason why India should not be able to
take advantage of labour-linking technologies and create more jobs for now.
However, to continue to be competitive in this dimension, India will have to
build skills and continue to improve and modernize its education system. As
Ghose’s (2016) recent study shows, not only is India’s labour force very poorly
educated, the distribution of education is also abysmal. This will cause a large
problem because the demand for unskilled work is bound to go down. Mechanical
work will soon not need labour because machines will out-compete labour, but
when it comes to creative work and research, human skills will continue to be
critical, at least in the foreseeable future. This is what takes us back to what was
stressed above—the importance of education, especially the development of
creative skills.
To absorb labour, it is also important to grow and nurture both the agricultural
and manufacturing sectors. India’s services sector, the engine of India’s good per-
formance, is virtually on autopilot now. Attention needs to be directed to the
other sectors, which also happen to be more labour-intensive. For this, work is
needed in two areas that have already been mentioned: namely, creating better
infrastructure and cutting down bureaucracy.13 There will be a challenge later
when wages rise and India becomes part of the global story. My belief is that India
will need radical reforms such as some form of profit sharing across the popula-
tion. But that is not a problem special to India, and so it is of no direct concern in
this chapter.

5. The Next Twenty-five Years

Peering into the distant future is not easy for any discipline. In the case of eco-
nomics, its intertwining with politics and sociology makes forecasting even more
hazardous. With that caveat in mind, here is some speculation about what the
next twenty-five years may hold in store for India.
It has been a remarkable half-century since when Myrdal’s seminal work drew
global attention to this newly-independent nation. All the portents are that India
will continue to grow rapidly and will take on the mantle of a growth leader in the
world.14 At this moment, this sounds overly optimistic since, politically and
socially, India is going through a bleak patch. The reason for my optimism is that

13 There have been some, more specific, exciting new ideas, such as the development of coastal
economic zones, that have been discussed in recent times (see Singh 2018).
14 See discussion in Basu (2015). See also Rodrik and Subramaniam (2004a).
420 Asian Transformations

I expect this to pass. A run of 9 per cent annual growth, which began in 2005 but
has slackened off since then, maintained over a twenty-year period is not a pipe
dream. If the country can get back onto such a growth path five years from now, it
will be a transformed nation by 2043. But there are risks and one would be remiss
not to point to them.
First, agriculture as a share of value-added in GDP has, over the last fifty years,
become quite small but it is still a vital sector that employs around half of the
nation’s labour force. Even a small decline in its production can cause food infla-
tion, large welfare losses among the poor, and even political instability. Therefore,
agriculture as a sector will continue to need nurture.
Second, as pointed out above, while technology will eventually create a global
challenge that will affect India, for some time still to come India can take advan-
tage of its cheap labour and boost its manufacturing sector. But to nurture this
sector, more investment is needed in infrastructure, the reduction of bureaucratic
costs, and also good macroeconomic policy, because a wrong exchange rate pol-
icy, or another move like demonetization, can blight the nation’s prospects.
Third, we have the challenge of inequality. As Ghatak (2017) documents, India
has a growing inequality problem, and unless it invests in health and education
and also taxes to curtail dynastic intergenerational transfers more effectively, it
may have growth but at the cost of true development. This will be a problem for
India for some time to come. While the growth story has been exemplary, various
indicators show that growth has not been distributed well across society (see
Subramanian 2016). This shows up clearly if we compare two countries that
have had similar growth, Vietnam and India. In terms of child malnutrition, for
­example, India has performed markedly less well than Vietnam (Ray 2008), show-
ing that the spoils of growth may not have been shared well; and, further, as
Vietnam’s experience shows this is not inevitable.
India has all these challenges but with its early investment in the political insti-
tutions of democracy, secularism, and openness, as well as in good universities
and institutes of higher learning, India has the potential to be in the frontline of
the world economy within the next quarter-century.

Acknowledgements

Early drafts of this chapter was presented at UNU-WIDER conferences in Hanoi on

9–10 March 2018, and in Shanghai on 29–30 June 2018. It has benefitted greatly from
discussions with Tony Addison, Alaka Basu, Amit Bhaduri, Prasenjit Duara, Guanghua,
Rolph van der Hoeven, Sudipto Mundle, Siddiq Osmani, Daniel Poon, Frances Stewart
and Finn Tarp. I am grateful to Deepak Nayyar and an anonymous referee for detailed
comments. I thank Aviv Caspi, Gowtham Muthukkumaran, Xinyue Pei and Haokun
Sun for research assistance.
 Kaushik Basu 421

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