Independent India is soon completing seventy three years of its existence. Anniversaries are a good time for stock taking of the progress made, identifying current trends and resolving to make course corrections. More than seven decades of experimentation with a democratic and inclusive political system, riddled with an inherited social and economic system which, despite significant improvements in recent times, continues to be patently unequal and unjust, is a story which has no parallel in human history. The journey so far calls for a dispassionate performance evaluation, howsoever unsatisfactory or incomplete it may be, on account of one’s limited knowledge,