THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF THE INDIAN ECONOMY IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Edited by Ashima Goyal
Oxford University Press
965 pages; Rs 2,495
The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Economy in the 21st Century is a real doorstopper. At 965 pages, it's meant to be all-inclusive. And, in this, it succeeds (and fails) as much as any single volume, however large, can. Whether it's worth the price - Rs 2,495 - is quite another matter.
The book has been edited by Ashima Goyal, a professor at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research in Mumbai. She has pulled together a large number of authors, including Laveesh Bhandari, Renu Kohli, Gita Sen, Ashwini Deshpande and Jayati Sarkar, most of whom write about their particular areas of expertise. It's an editor's job to maintain a consistent standard throughout and, as far as is allowed by the resources available to her, Ms Goyal manages that.
Still, there are high points and low points. The chapter on primary education from Rukmini Banerji and Wilima Wadhwa, which draws heavily on the Annual Status of Education Report, or the ASER, reports that Ms Banerji produces, is one such. Reading it, one figures out exactly when such chapters in a volume like this work: when they provide exactly the relevant data, such as enrolment trends in this case; when they are set up to answer questions, rather than address the authors' hobbyhorses; when they report the debate fairly, for in such issues there is always a debate; and when they lay out the gaps in existing policy.
Gita Sen's chapter on public health shares almost all of these positives - in particular, an accessible and readable style. But Professor Sen ends with a defence of the recommendations of the High Level Expert Group (HLEG) on health, of which she was a prominent member. Those recommendations might well be the way forward in India. But, as with several other chapters in this book, it means that other streams of thought - that, for example, might recommend greater private provision than the HLEG is comfortable with - are blanked out.
And some chapters are just plain unreadable, in spite of what I am sure was a heroic effort by Professor Goyal. The chapter on industry (rendered as "the industry" throughout the chapter) by Bandi Ram Prasad of Financial Technologies was one such. I read it twice, and am still not certain what it is about. Is it about the markets? About manufacturing? About needed policy reform?
There are eight broad sections: an overview of reform; macro; openness; inclusion; governance; infrastructure; sectors; and factor markets. Given that this is a 965-page book, it would be a little greedy, if not downright ungrateful, to point out things that have been oddly overlooked. But if a gun were held to my head and I were asked what has been left out, I'd have to say that I'm puzzled, for example, by the lack of a chapter on land. Surely land ceilings, land revenue, and land-use laws are a major constraint on growth? Land acquisition is discussed in brief at various points in the volume, but if there's a comprehensive treatment of the issues anywhere in those 965 pages, then I missed it. Manufacturing should not have been left to Mr Prasad. Ports and highways, too, given their importance as policy topics and economic bottlenecks, deserve better treatment than they receive.
Indeed the infrastructure chapter, by Ram Singh and Param Jit, could profitably have been expanded and split into several chapters, at the least. In addition, it ends - as do many other chapters in this book - with recommended reforms. This feels odd.
Indeed the book claims - both in its foreword, by Bimal Jalan, and in its introduction, by Professor Goyal - to be neutral in position, or non-ideological. This claim doesn't hold up when judged against the tendency in so many chapters to recommend preferred policy, rather than to present, pragmatically, the pluses and the minuses. It particularly doesn't hold up when you notice that both Dr Jalan and Professor Goyal both blame economic stagnation on "vote bank politics". When you start by making an evidence-free, ideological statement while claiming to be non-ideological … . Suffice it to say that a chapter on India's political economy, with particular attention to academic work on the formation of policy by elite technocrats, might have been useful reading all round.
The larger question that this issue of ideology, and of recommendations, gives rise to is this: what is this book trying to achieve? Is it a series of extra-long op-eds, urging particular reforms on us? If so, it works excellently. However, you can't recommend it to everyone then. People unfamiliar with the debates need something else. Then there's another question: how long before a book that makes recommendations, and takes on specific policy lacunae, is obsolescent? In 2011, the same publisher released The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Economy. Presumably, the absence of a century in the title means that that one was supposed to be the long-term book, and this one the short-term one. But even the occasional essay in that book looks outdated in 2014. How soon will this Handbook age?
Frankly, for the weight and for the purpose of a solid introduction to the Indian economy, with all the data and all the context and all the debates, you could still go to Uma Kapila's Indian Economy since Independence, now in its 24th edition, and get what you need. For one-fifth the price.
