I am an India optimist. I hear and see change happening that gives me hope for India’s future. Others hear contention and see confusion. They despair that India cannot get its act together. But I hear a connection and I see a pattern that gives me confidence that India is coming together. The Indian flotilla is forming and moving.
Ambassador George F. Kennan’s observation about democracy (in American Diplomacy-World War I) is worth recalling. He wrote:
“I sometimes wonder if democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters (dinosaurs) with a body as long as a large room and a brain the size of a pin; he lies there in his uncomfortably primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath—in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely his native habitat. You wonder whether it would not have been wiser for him to have taken a little more interest in what was going on at an earlier date and to have seen whether he could have prevented some of these situations from arising instead of proceeding from an indiscriminate indifference to a holy wrath equally undiscriminating.”
India’s progress has encountered obstacles in its path. India’s democracy has awakened. The rumbling sounds of debates, contentions, and protests, getting louder, that are being heard in India are the sounds of Indian democracy shifting into a lower gear to draw more power to the wheels and overcome these obstacles.
‘Retail’ corruption, affecting citizens whenever they have to interact with the government to obtain services has become endemic. When the extent of ‘whole sale’ corruption, with millions, even billions of dollars given by businesses to politicians to obtain access to mineral resources, to land, and spectrum came to light, citizens felt corruption had gone too far. Two years ago, millions of people rallied around the country and besieged Parliament demanding that the Indian government take strong measures to curb corruption. A year later, provoked by a heinous rape of a woman, millions came out again demanding that government provide more security to women. They complained about the indifference of the police and administration to citizens’ needs. These 21st century Indian protests were marked by the emergence of the middle class who had been indifferent for decades leaving the hard work of protests to the poorer classes. Now they were at the forefront on the streets. And they deployed new millennium tools of communication—the internet and social media—to magnify the protests.
Masses protesting on the streets, with the middle class in the vanguard, deploying the power of the internet and social media, were features of the Arab Spring too. The Arab Spring created hope that a new democratic order would emerge in those countries where these massive protests had overthrown despotic regimes. Sadly, the hope has faded fast. Anarchy or the re-emergence of another despotic regime have been the outcomes. Kennan’s beast seems to have destroyed its adversary and its native habitat too.
What then of Indian democracy which has been aroused? Will it only flail around? Or is it on a forward course. My reading is that India is moving in the right direction.
The course the country is taking cannot be gleaned from trends in tweets, or swings of stock markets. One moment it is this, and another it is that. These are shallow sources of information from which many commentators on the politics and the economics of India (and other countries) try to determine the direction change is taking. Such sources of information are inadequate. They track the movements on the surface only, movements that swing up and down. These can be exhilarating like the sweeps up and down of surf-riders. However they do not describe the deeper pattern of long distance currents within the ocean. To see those patterns, one must look deeper, at longer historical forces, to understand the ‘fundamentals’. And one must also step back, to see the ‘big picture’ which brings together many forces, including social, political, and environmental forces that shape economic outcomes. It is not sufficient to look just at the economic numbers, of stock market swings and GDP changes that are resultants of these underlying fundamental forces.
The ‘fundamentals’ of societies and economies that enable them to progress are their institutions. When progress is stalling, often it is institutions that must be reformed. They provide the power to progress. What I see is an awakening of India’s democracy to the need to improve the country’s institutions. What citizens are saying to leaders is, we have lost trust in the country’s government institutions, and even its big businesses. They say that these institutions are not serving the needs of people. They are looking after their own. Citizens want leaders to fix the institutions.
Scenarios and Leverage Points for Change
Discourse about the futures of countries is framed too narrowly in the financial and business media in terms of the conditions of the countries’ economies only. In this framing of countries as (merely) economies, which way the country will go in the future is gauged by how much its GDP will grow. However, how much GDP will grow in the medium and long term can be assessed only by an understanding of deeper social, political, and environmental forces, and not by tracking economic numbers only. The need to understand what is really happening in India by combining insights into many forces, not merely the economic forces usually tracked by economists, led to the use of techniques of systems thinking and scenario planning for the first time by India’s Planning Commission in 2012 while developing the country’s 12th Five Year Plan. It is worthwhile to dwell a moment on how these techniques were used and what they have revealed.
Insights into all the forces shaping a complex system can emerge from a process akin to bringing all the blind men together who are touching different parts of the elephant. Each sees an incomplete reality, based on which he jumps to a conclusion about the nature of the whole beast. Only when many blinded by blinkers of their ideologies, societal associations, and academic disciplines, combine their views can the shape of the beast be fully seen. To prepare the India scenarios the Planning Commission brought together leaders from civil society, business, and economic, environmental, and strategic think tanks, to listen to each other, and prepare a diagram of the whole system with their pooled insights. Experts in facilitation of dialogue and systems’ analysis guided the process. The outcome of the process was a description of three plausible scenarios of India’s future. These scenarios have been published along with India’s 12th Five Year Plan.
The scenarios describe what will determine whether or not India’s GDP will grow as large as the BRICs analysis had projected, which was based almost entirely on economic ‘fundamentals’. Indeed, there is fear that the BRICs (and other economic projections that had come to similar optimistic conclusions) may have been wrong. This is now leading to a debate between pessimists and optimists about India’s future. An understanding of the deeper forces and the directions these forces are taking, and not merely the trends in GDP, investments, and savings and such purely economic numbers on the radar of economists, is required to determine whether one should be pessimistic or optimistic about India’s future.
My optimism comes from using the lens of the scenarios to understand whither India. The systems analysis reveals three plausible scenarios of India. They have evocative titles: The Flotilla Advances; Muddling Along; and Falling Apart. (In the official 12th Plan document these scenarios are called, Strong Inclusive Growth, Insufficient Action, and Policy Logjam.)
The principal difference amongst the three scenarios is the quality of alignment amongst the stakeholders in the great Indian enterprise: the Indian states and the centre; between government, business, and civil society; and alignments within these stakeholder groups too. The closer all come to a shared vision of the best course for the country and act accordingly, the faster will be the country’s progress towards its goals of more inclusive, more sustainable, and faster growth. The longer stakeholders take to come into an alignment, in other words the longer the country ‘muddles along’, the greater the negative fall-out on its progress will be. In the worst scenario, prolonged delay in alignment can result in the Indian growth story falling apart.
The poet Iqbal had described the hope that a new vision can give. I paraphrase his poetic Urdu words. He said, “A vision that gives hope is like the pale light on the horizon that precedes the dawn. It dimly shows a path from where I stand towards the horizon I must reach. As the light strengthens just a little more, I begin to see green shoots of grass beneath the frost on the path before my feet.”
According to the scenarios, there are three leverage points at which change must happen in the country. The policy discourse must change around these leverage points, the need for action towards a new direction must be accepted, and small steps of action in that direction must become visible. What I see from the scenarios is a path for India and a few green shoots of grass already visible on it. These signs give me hope that the country is changing direction towards a better path towards its goals.
1. Inclusion Strategy
The first leverage point for strategic change revealed by the scenario analysis is around the question of how inclusion of people in the economy should be brought about.
For the past ten years, India has been governed by an unusual arrangement for a Parliamentary democracy. The leader of the Congress party, that won the national elections in 2004, chose not to lead the government and nominated another person as the Prime Minister of the country. It was widely believed that the Congress’s surprising win in the 2004 elections was because the previous BJP-led government had gloated too much about the ‘shine’ appearing atop the Indian economy, and had become insensitive to the unmitigated darkness within it.
Mindful of the need to give voice to the excluded a new organization was formed, the National Advisory Council (NAC), led by the leader of the Congress, to ‘advise’ the government particularly on matters of inclusion of those who have been excluded from the economy’s growth. The underlying ‘theory-in- use’ which the NAC relied on to include excluded people in the economy was to deliver directly to them has been to hand-out to them what they do not have—food, shelter, and even incomes for the old. Large national schemes have been rolled out to deliver a minimum quantity of food at highly subsidised prices and an assured 100 days of employment on public works in rural areas. Both programmes existed earlier but they have been expanded and guaranteed by laws such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the Right to Food Act.
In the course of the development of the India scenarios while preparing the 12th Plan, the civil society representatives had argued with the business representatives and economists (and argued amongst themselves too) about the best way to include people in growth. A consensus emerged that people are properly included in the economy’s growth when they have more incomes, through productive employment or their own enterprise, rather than by ‘hand-outs’ to them. When they stand on their own feet and earn, and can choose what they want to buy, they have dignity and self-respect too. Whereas when they are given hand-outs, they are supplicants for the generosity (and the ability) of those who already have to give them what they need. It was also recognised that for hand-outs to be sustainable, the ability of those who have, which includes the state’s exchequer too, must be sustainable. This requires faster economic growth.
In the other component of the strategy for inclusion, that the scenarios and the Plan highlight, much of inclusion comes from faster growth of livelihoods and jobs. By this strategy, the more the people at the bottom earn, the more the economy grows too. People are taken out of their condition of exclusion from the economy when they can rise and stand on their own feet, rather than more hand-outs to them. Therefore, the focus of policy-makers must shift from devising larger schemes to give, to stimulating a pattern of growth that creates more productive enterprises, especially small ones that create more jobs.
As India’s GDP began to grow faster from 2004 onwards, reaching 9% per annum by 2010, the advocates, many amongst the economics profession and corporate communities and some within the Planning Commission and the government, of faster GDP growth as a panacea for India began to feel vindicated. Civil society supporters and other critics amongst economists and the Left political parties, became ideologically more firm in their opposition to the GDP celebrants. The Planning Commission claimed that GDP growth had reduced poverty in the country as the data clearly showed it had. Critics criticised the poverty line as being too low. The Supreme Court jumped into the fray too and asked the Planning Commission to explain its position. Many critics of the Planning Commission said it did not ‘get it’, and that, sitting in its ivory tower cut off from the people of the country, it never would. The Planning Commission said that raising the poverty line is always possible but it wlould not alter the fact that poverty as measured by any fixed line had definitely declined.
The debate between the two paradigms of development—growth first to enable inclusion later, or inclusion first to lead to growth—even spilled out into a public debate on the pages of international newspapers, with world-famed economists Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati being invoked as champions of opposing corners.
I see a reconciliation emerging now. Members of both camps acknowledge that neither more hand-outs nor merely more GDP are adequate solutions for sustainable inclusion. GDP growth without jobs is not a socially sustainable path, and is rife with political risk too. And subsidies must be restrained to avoid strains to the government’s finances and the economy that are already visible.
Both sides are beginning to agree that creation of more jobs and better livelihoods is the course to pursue. The Planning Commission and government have begun to focus on employment generation. They accept that a new approach is required to accelerate growth of the manufacturing sector, which had been left to the vagaries of more ‘market’ as the solution following the liberal economic reforms in the 1990s. There is agreement that Government has a role to play to induce more strength in India’s ailing manufacturing sector, which is confronted by competition from the very determined management of manufacturing growth by China, and competition from well advanced manufacturers in other countries also.
2. Governance Strategy
The second leverage point for accelerating inclusive growth is to reorient structures of governance from centralisation to decentralisation. The Congress party’s espoused theory of governance has always been to give power to the people, beginning with Mahatma Gandhi’s call to make India’s villages the focus of the country’s development, to the 73rd and 74th Amendments to India’s Constitution championed by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi that required that powers be given to local rural and urban bodies to manage their own affairs. However devolution has remained only an espoused theory. The theory-in-use has diverged widely from it. In practice, when results are not coming fast enough, and when there is urgency to ‘scale up’ action, strong direction and more control from the centre are considered the best solutions especially by the Central Government. More centrally funded schemes in sectors that belong to the states have been introduced by the two UPA governments in their decade long tenure than in any other time in India’s recent history. Undoubtedly another motivation for more central schemes, funded with money allocated from the centre, has been to get popular support for the Central Government in a period when the Indian states are often managed by other political parties.
The demand for decentralisation to the states is very strong. The central government has begun to respond to it. Widespread criticism of large central schemes—that one size does not fit all; that outcomes are poor in proportion to the moneys spent; that there is insufficient people’s participation—has led the Planning Commission to introduce much more decentralisation in its approach in the 12th Plan. Central schemes will now have some flexibility given to the states to spend as they consider fit to achieve the overall outcomes for which the schemes are required. Since a criticism of the push to decentralize is that local bodies do not have the capabilities to manage and will make a mess, the solution is to help them to build their capabilities. It is noteworthy that the 12th Five Year Plan has focused on programs to proactively strengthen capabilities of local rural and urban governance organizations.
3. Enterprise strategy
The third leverage point is an architecture of institutions that will enable more effective management of the environment and faster growth of employment as well. Large dams have been a strategy adopted in India (as in many countries) to harness and distribute water. ‘Ultra mega’ power projects have become the preferred solution for solving the country’s power shortage. Such large projects require a lot of land, and displace large numbers of people. They take a long time to build. And they must distribute their output to many distant consumers. The long time they can take to become operational and the large space of their operational foot-print make them vulnerable to many risks. Many of India’s mega projects have become stuck. Bank loans to them are at risk. Investors in them have got their fingers badly burned. Not only are these stuck, large projects not delivering what was expected of them. They have created problems for the country’s financial systems too.
Networks of small enterprises are more adjustable and scaleable than large scale projects locked in place. Small dispersed enterprises connected into large networks can be very effective for management of the country’s strained water resources and for producing energy from renewable sources. Smaller projects are quicker to get off the ground. Their footprint is smaller. Producers and consumers are generally closer together. Many small projects can be connected into a large network which gives the combined enterprise large scale and reach too. Modern communications technologies enable small projects to network and scale up in ways that were not feasible before. In a large country with the diversity of ecologies and cultures that India has, and a country in which political and administrative power has to be distributed, a few very large enterprises is not a practical way to produce results. Better results would come from many smaller ones.
Networks of small enterprises are beginning to grow in India. Producer cooperatives of local weavers and carpet makers are being connected into large marketing networks with international reach. Small BPO centres are springing up in small towns. The government has also recognized the power of small enterprises. The country’s Manufacturing Plan focuses on SMEs and strengthening of clusters of SMEs. The national water policy to manage the country’s pressing water problems has also shifted attention towards local actions.
Learning to Collaborate; Learning to Implement
The first requirement for faster action for change in any direction is the recognition of the need for change in that direction. The second requirement is to have the means to accelerate the action. Like the appearance of the green shoots of grass beneath the early morning frost that poet Iqbal evoked so eloquently, change is appearing around the three leverage points of governance the India scenarios have analysed. Now Indians must walk more firmly and faster along this path. Will they? Or will India’s policies and projects be mired in contentions and confusion? Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul’s books have been acidic and despairing commentaries on India, such as An Area of Darkness and A Wounded Civilisation. When India’s economy began to be opened in the late 1980s, Naipaul wrote a book with hope for the country’s future, with the title India: A Million Mutinies Now. What Naipaul heard then was a new awakening of India’s democracy and its economy. 25 years have passed since that awakening. If Naipaul were to write another book on India now, the title could well be India: A Million Bottlenecks Now.
Contention amongst stakeholders has stalled many economic reforms and large projects in India in the last five years. Reforms to allow more foreign investments in the retail and financial sectors have not progressed. Plans for mega steel, power, and aluminium plants are stuck. With investments drying up, a high level Cabinet Committee has been set up very recently to unclog bottlenecks for major projects. Investors have welcomed the government’s efforts, though many say these efforts are too little and deeper reform is necessary. Co-ordination between government’s many departments is tied up in red tape—literally, in paper files tied in red tape, moving up and down ministerial silos and back and forth across them, as they used to be a hundred years ago.
Government’s tardy decision making processes must be reformed. They need to be re-engineered to fit 21st century global realities. Who will be the best reformer and the best manager? Who can get things done? This will be a key focus of the next general elections. The brake on India’s growth has been highlighted in the public discourse and the political process will judge different parties by the solutions they offer.
A new initiative in the Twelfth Plan is the idea of creating an India Backbone Implementation Network (IbIn), modelled on the lines of the Total Quality Movement (TQM) that transformed Japan after the Second World War from a nation that produced shoddy and cheap products to the hallmark of quality in most industries. The TQM movement disseminated techniques for people to improve systems they were a part of. Application of these techniques enabled a nation-wide transformation within a few years. Similarly, IbIn will propagate techniques to convert contention into collaboration and confusion into coordination, thereby enabling intentions of Indian leaders to convert into implementation. IbIn is an innovative idea and has grown fairly rapidly since its launch earlier this year into a few healthy saplings. It must spread and grow into a national movement.
Now to the Numbers
There are many early signs that the Indian system has begun to turn around the critical leverage points that will make the economy grow. However economists want numbers. They want to know what will be the growth rate of India’s GDP for the next ten years. The Planning Commission asked the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) to use the insights from the scenario analysis to calculate what would be India’s growth rates in the 12th Five Year Plan in the three different scenarios viz. The Flotilla Advances, Muddling Along, and Falling Apart.
Economists will find it difficult to include the quality of institutions and the pace of implementation of change into their calculations, even though these are two fundamental dimensions on which the three scenarios differ. Institutions and Implementation are not easily quantifiable concepts. Therefore economists invariably exclude them from their econometric models. Economists may be aware that the outcome ‘e’ is the result of variables ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, and ‘d’. If variables ‘c’ and ‘d’ cannot be quantified, they are left out of the equation. No wonder predictions of what ‘e’ will be can be quite wrong. NCAER found some ways to adjust its models to include the influence of Institutions and Implementation on the purely economic numbers—investments, savings, outputs, and GDP growth.
NCAER predicted that on a worst case scenario the growth of India’s GDP would fall below 5% if India’s institutions were not reformed and implementation of policies and projects was not improved. It has fallen to 5 percent and though this is partly due to global downturn and internat constraints which the government is trying to address, the key point is that if these are not addressed growth will be much lower than many people hope.
It is noteworthy that NCAER had made this assessment in 2005 also when it was asked to estimate the economic consequence of another set of scenarios of the Indian economy. Those scenarios were prepared by the World Economic Forum (WEF) to respond to the needs of some of its members who were sceptical of the BRICs forecasts. These members felt that the BRICs predictions of China’s and India’s and other countries’ long term growth did not factor in the effects of political and social changes. Therefore the WEF produced three scenarios of India in 2005 considering social and political developments in the country also and published them in a document called India and the World: Scenarios to 2025. The WEF (and NCAER) forecasted that India’s GDP would rise to over 9% within three or four years (as it did). They also predicted that the growth would fall towards 5% within seven or eight years (as it has) if institutional reforms were not made in time.
The WEF scenarios were built upon insights from another set of India scenarios prepared even earlier, in 2000. Those foundational scenarios had examined more deeply the effects of different models of large systems’ governance and leadership in India. These scenarios were summarised in a report, Scenarios for India 2010: An Invitation to Make a Difference, published by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). These scenarios described the architecture of institutions required for India: a vast, diverse, and democratic country that had aspirations and needs for faster growth. The architecture was founded on four ‘Ls’—Localization, Lateralization, Learning, and Listening.
The benefits of ‘Localization’ of governance and leadership have emerged every time scenarios have been made for India, in 2000, 2005, and 2012. The need for effective ‘Lateralization’ of governance and enterprises—by more effective collaboration amongst various stakeholders with the breaching of silos within organizations—has also emerged every time. The third ‘L’ is an emphasis on the system’s ability to ‘Learn’, rather than on design of systems for top down monitoring and control. Lastly, better ‘Listening’ is critical for dialogues that build lateral collaborations, and also for faster learning.
An enduring image that emerged from the earliest scenarios of 2000, which has carried on through the 2005 and the 2012 scenarios, is an image of ‘Fireflies Arising’. Many small initiatives and innovations that spring up in greater abundance, each bringing its own light, and connect together into a rising swarm of change can turn darkness into light. The ‘Flotilla Advances’ is another metaphor for the same idea that Fireflies Arising depicts. It is the idea of many independent actors rising and advancing with their own energies and of their own choice, and doing this together, towards the same goal. Both images represent an essence of India: a democratic country advancing democratically.
Coalition Politics
When the India scenarios were prepared in 2000, and the evocative image of fireflies arising was presented to an audience of economists and business leaders, many sceptics amongst them questioned the validity this idea. The strategy of localization, lateralization, and learning, was logical for a vast, diverse, and democratic country, they said. However, they were concerned about India’s progress being disabled by India’s competitive politics. Regional parties were gathering strength. Coalitions were being cobbled together to form national governments. The pessimists feared that without a strong centre, India’s development story was destined to fall apart.
There was great uncertainty in 2000, as there is now, about what the outcome of a national election will be. It is most likely that no party will win a sufficient majority to form a national government on its own. While dreaming that a single party and a strong central leader may emerge, there was then as there is now, the fear of the harm an autocracy could inflict on India’s democracy. The memory of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency government that had suspended civil liberties in the 1970s was present in 2000, and though fading, is not forgotten even now.
The purpose of scenarios is not to predict. It is to anticipate all plausible outcomes. Scenarios also serve to validate whether a proposed strategy will make the enterprise successful in all plausible scenarios. The scenarists set about testing the 4L /‘Fireflies’ strategy in all plausible political configurations of national and state governments.
he first question was whether there will be a coalition government or a single party government at the centre and whether the party at the centre would also rule the majority of the states. Money was being wagered that it would be the former, i.e. a politically fragmented governance of the country. The hope of many was for the latter, i.e. a single party political configuration, which they thought would give more stability to the country as well as ability to the central government to make policies applicable throughout the country. The second question was what will be the quality of the coalition government or the single party government.
Thus four alternative outcomes of national elections could be envisaged. They are described here in broad brush terms.
A. Kaleidoscope. In this configuration power in the centre and in the states is shared by several parties. The quality of the political configuration could be either:
A1. Federal Harmony (The parties respect each other and learn to work together), or
A2. You stab my back I stab yours (Politicians provide front page entertainment)
B. Monochrome. In this configuration one party dominates throughout the country. The quality of the governance could be either:
B1. Ramrajya (Magnanimous enlightened leadership, with losers cooperating in the nation-building agenda), or
B2. Volcano (Seething trouble, with losers waiting to strike)
Two of these outcomes, viz. A1 and B1, are better than the other two, viz. A2 and B2.
The scenarists projected what the condition of the country would be in each of these situations if the strategy of developing institutions along the four Ls was followed, leading to the Fireflies Arising scenario as it was called in 2000, or the very similar Flotilla Advancing scenario of 2012. They also examined what the condition would be if this strategy was not followed. The unambiguous conclusion was that the country would be ‘de-risked’ against electoral uncertainties if the base of governance was strengthened with the 4L strategy.
Though these insights into the principles for building the institutions India needs were published way back in 2000 by CII, it was very difficult to make them noticed. So it has been with the scenarios of 2005 published by WEF and the scenarios of 2012 published by the Planning Commission which have affirmed the same principles. The public discourse, fuelled by the media, is too busy with the debates of the moment, the daily swings of the stock market, and hourly trending of tweets.
Managing Sustainable Growth
The economic fundamentals on which the optimistic projections of India’s growth were based in the BRICs study (and by other think-tanks’ too) have not changed between 2003 when they were made and now. India’s young demography is unchanged. The children have already been born and are growing up year after year whatever the condition of India’s economy may be. India’s need for infrastructure—for transport, power, education, health, and urban development—remains to be fulfilled. India continues to be a consumption-led economy with very low levels of consumption so far. Therefore India is a huge potential market. And the economy has been open to the world except in very few sectors and remains so.
When the economy’s growth rate began to slip, the economic advisers sitting beside the driver, watching the GDP speed-o-meter on the dash-board, told the driver to push harder on the accelerator. More economic reforms they said: open up the economy even further.
The systems thinkers and scenarists in the back-seat, listening to the sound of the engine and transmission, have been tapping the driver’s shoulder saying it is time to down-shift, to fix the institutions, so that more power can go from the engine to the wheels, or else the car will soon stall. As it has now.
In China, with its single party government throughout the country, analysts may gauge which way China’s economy may go in the next ten years from the pronouncements of leaders at the top. In a functioning democracy, which India is, which way India’s economy will go in the next ten years cannot be gauged from the pronouncements of elected leaders at the top who will change. In India, one has to listen to the sounds of the democratic system within.
Why I, a back-seat India systems observer, am now an optimist is because I am hearing the transmission down-shift into the right gears. The need for institutional reforms is being acknowledged. Early signs suggest that the architecture of the fundamental reforms that is emerging may be of the required sort too, along the lines of the four ‘Ls’. This will give the car the power it needs to overcome the obstacles it is encountering on its path.
I end with a caveat. If leaders at the top make the institutional reforms required their explicit agenda and marshal resources to implement them, India will pull through and its growth will benefit from its economic fundamentals which are unchanged. To assist the government in the driving seat, the Planning Commission should install a measure of institutional conditions—an RPM gauge—on the dash-board for the Indian government to watch, beside the GDP speed-o-meter. In fact, because one can manage better what one measures, I would recommend three more gauges on the dash-board beside the GDP speed-o-meter: a good indicator of environmental sustainability; a better measure of ‘inclusion’; and an institutional condition indicator (the RPM gauge I have suggested already).
Democracy, Kennan’s flailing beast, has found a path hazily emerging. India should stay on it for a while. Then India will prove to the world that democracy and the sustainable development of a large, diverse nation are compatible (even necessary) conditions, not enemies of each other as many sceptics fear they are.