A Sixth of Humanity

India's journey has been distinctively precocious among its peers. It opted for democracy before development and social change, promoted high-skilled services before and over low-skilled manufacturing, and chose a globalization that favored the export of talented people and short-changed the poor. Its socialist state became an inefficiently capitalist one before providing the public goods of physical infrastructure and human capital. The outcomes have been surprising, with the country achieving success in creating and sustaining democracy, albeit flawed, and maintaining a degree of social and political order. Four decades of economic dynamism and the emergence of a more capable Indian state has given it the ability to build infrastructure and deliver the essentials of life to its population at scale.

However, just as India's aspiration has lifted to building world-class statues, temples, bullet trains, airports and digital systems, the undermining of some of its real achievements of democracy, federalism and nation-building still stand in the way. As the world gets radically upended, India's development odyssey sits at a critical juncture.

In A Sixth of Humanity, Devesh Kapur and Avrind Subramanian trace how one of the world's largest and most diverse countries uniquely attempted four concurrent transformations: building a state, creating an economy, changing society and forging a sense of nationhood. In outlining its past by drawing on deep archives of political and economic policy documents spaning over 75 years, Kapur and Subramanian provide a compelling picture of the state of India's political economy and the crossroads it now faces.