What is playing out in Rajasthan is significant because it shows the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is serious about reforming hiring and firing laws and the Factories Act, which, for instance, limits the amount of overtime workers can do to all of 50 hours per quarter. Labour laws are on the Concurrent List, which allows states like Rajasthan to pass the necessary laws and forward them to the president for approval. If the other states and the Centre follow, India could make a late start at competing for labour-intensive jobs in garments, shoes and toys. Some of the jobs in these industries are exiting China - as its factory wages rise at double-digit levels - for destinations like Bangladesh, Vietnam and Indonesia, deemed more investor-friendly than India.
The proposed changes to the Factories Act include increasing the penalties for breaking the law. India's principal problem is that it is a flailing state; the government meddles in far too much while remaining lax in areas such as regulation and policing, where only it can take the lead. In an article this month in Yojana, Ajay Shah writes, "Almost all the problems of Indian infrastructure today can be traced to deficiencies of the state in planning, contracting and regulation."
Manish Sabharwal, who heads TeamLease, which has 95,000 employees, tells the story of trying to get the previous government to agree to allow him to hire 200,000 apprentices. India, with just 300,000 apprentices, lags badly behind South Korea and China (with 20 million). Everyone at senior levels of the government thought his plan to make it easier to hire apprentices was a good one. Since 2009, however, Mr Sabharwal has had to reply to 37 letters from the ministry of labour, but is not much closer to his goal. "How does one get things done in government even when everyone agrees with you?" asks Mr Sabharwal.
It sounds like a rhetorical question, but in Lutyens' Delhi it is the question of the hour, central to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's desire to change India's governance. The Rajasthan government has also led the way in doing away with the state's equivalent of the Planning Commission, while Mr Modi seems in no hurry to appoint people to the Planning Commission in New Delhi. "The challenge today is not just of deregulation, of stroke of the pen reforms, which eliminate laws," observes Mr Shah, but building the capacities of the state. Central to the challenge is that communication between the Centre and the states has never been so unwieldy. The National Development Council has ballooned from a body of 14 chief ministers when it started in 1952 under Jawaharlal Nehru to one that involves more than 400 officials today.
What the BJP government will have to guard against is mission creep, which was apparent in the president's speech on Monday. To pick just one example: the emphasis on ensuring our youth become better educated should begin by focusing on improving the poor arithmetic and reading standards in our government schools, but this scarcely merited a mention. Instead, we heard about the government's plans to throw good money after bad by dramatically increasing the number of the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management, as the United Progressive Alliance did. And now the government also wants to start a national sports talent search system. But there are also plans for a national multi-skill mission, whatever that entails. We are poised to go from Scam India to Skill India, the prime minister said on Wednesday, somewhat elliptically. The president's speech, like the BJP's manifesto, alluded to India's advantages of demography, demand and democracy, which was confusing enough. Memo to the speechwriters: your agonising addiction to alliteration is creating a communications chasm between a popular prime minister and the people.
Unusually for politicians, if the evidence on labour laws in Rajasthan was anything to go by, what this government does has thus far proved more interesting than what it says. If it keeps its priorities short and keeps the pressure on the bureaucracy, change will happen. In the 1970s, Jan Morris wrote an essay for Rolling Stone in which she described the New Delhi bureaucracy as "a power sucker, feeding upon its own consequence by ... triplicate applications, copies and comments and addenda and references to precedent ... much of it not concerned with practical reality at all but with hypotheses or dogma". If it requires 37 letters to the ministry of labour to start a large-scale apprenticeship programme, not enough has changed.
Twitter: @RahulJJacob