Reconciling 'development' dilemmas

Accelerating India's Development: A State-led Roadmap for Effective Governance 

Author: Karthik Muralidharan

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 832

Price: Rs 1,299

Don’t be daunted by the size of this book; it’s an easy read because the author views his subject through the eyes of the non-specialist rather than the rarefied world of economists. In fact, Karthik Muralidharan has made good use of his consultations and field experiments for various arms of the Centre and state governments. As a result, it has a dirt-under-the-fingernails quality that our Economic Surveys lack.
 

Accelerating India’s Development is about enhancing development and growth by improving public service delivery. It reconciles the dilemmas of development vs democracy, equity vs efficiency, and numbers vs skills (in public service staff) in a practical and implementable way. Divided into four sections, the book uniquely demonstrates that criticism need not be the primary language of analysis. The book rightly pierces open the smokescreen of “averages”, the most convenient way of hiding the truth, missing opportunities and covering the rot.
 

Section 1 discusses the plight of politicians and bureaucrats caught in India’s “democracy before development” approach. For politicians who lament that they know the best solutions but don’t know how to get elected after implementing them, this book holds lots of ideas.
 

Section 2 is about improving public service delivery and capacity building. It includes compelling ideas on harnessing data, mobilising and motivating staff and raising revenues and allocation based on 70:20:10 proportional to equality, equity, and effectiveness.

The author rightly argues that India is excessively centralised, politically and fiscally, a legacy of the fears of national disintegration uppermost in the minds of the drafters of the Constitution at Independence. Spending at the discretion of local governments where most services get delivered are 51 per cent in China, 27 per cent in the US and Brazil, and a distant 3 per cent in India. Now that those fears have proved misplaced, it may be time to rethink funding patterns. Many centrally sponsored schemes, the author points out, only lead to “adherence to process and abdication of accountability”.

Section 3 discusses five key areas of public service delivery — education, health care, police and public safety, courts and justice, and social protection and welfare. By focusing on facts first, principles and implementable ideas next, and revealing many myths, this section is both convincing and thought provoking.

The pitfalls of our education have been brought out well, as epitomised by the quote of a former education secretary that “except getting most of the children to school, everything that could go wrong has gone wrong with school education in India”. The crisis extends to skills and makes India’s hopes for a demographic dividend seem largely misplaced.
 

The chapter on health care, a sector where the laissez faire solution is intolerable is a revelation. Consider these facts: (i) 80 per cent of India’s health care is provided by non-qualified practitioners; (ii) on field trials, for testing adherence to a standard medical check list and prescription for tuberculosis, diarrhoea, dysentery, and pre-eclampsia, only 71 per cent of the MBBS doctors, 40 per cent of AYUSH doctors and, surprisingly, 44 per cent of unqualified doctors managed all cases correctly. Perhaps there is a low-hanging fruit here. It may be better to train the unqualified practitioners and quickly increase the reach of proper medical care.
 

The author rightly emphasises that the goals of welfare programmes should be to help the poor escape the poverty trap; instead, many programmes incentivise them to stay poor. Public spending can yield far better welfare if there is predictability and reliability. The author’s thoughts on replacing the electricity-subsidy trap are useful. Ideas on urbanisation, scaling up, and tackling misallocation as tools for improving productivity and creating jobs — a forgotten goal — find resonance.

The author's idea about practicum training — “training while doing contractual engagement”— seems to hold promise across sectors.
 

An abridged version of the book could enhance reach. Politicians are likely to consider suggestions for development schemes that are implementable in one or two years, with results visible in the next two years to give them bragging rights in the next elections. Many of the suggestions would fit this schedule.
 

The author's ideas about making a common goods and services (GST) rate or taxing factors with inelastic supply like land, need to be more carefully thought out. Even the euro zone has multiple GST rates and has its share of “invoice mills”. Suggested reforms on voting may be efficient but suffer implementation difficulties.
 

If the worth of an economist is judged by “how dirty his shoes are”, the book has made a strong case for the author being a potential chief economic advisor.
 

Overall, it is a must read for bureaucrats and policy analysts, recommended for politicians, and worthwhile for professionals and others with even a cursory interest in the politics and economics of Indian development.

The reviewer is the author of Making Growth Happen in India (Sage)