Unshackling the Indian State: Review of Karthik Muralidharan’s Accelerating India’s Development
Governments in India are behemoths that most Indians interact with but very few truly understand. Critiques of state capacity in India (with a few notable exceptions like TV Somanathan and Gulzar Natarajan’s State Capability in India) are often centred around either inefficiencies generated by state led implementation of programs or the inability of the Indian state to do enough for our impoverished millions. What differentiates Muralidharan’s tome from other such critiques is the recognition that reality is much more complicated. India has of late seen a proliferation of books on policy and political economy by ‘wonks’ of various hues. Many such works are guilty of superficial research and banal stereotyping of the dysfunctional Indian state. There is very little understanding of factors that prohibit optimum performance by governments in India.
Spread over 18 chapters the book deals with issues relating to many important sectors. The chapters can be divided into two broad baskets, first the ones that deal with specific sectors like health, education, public finance, police and courts. Second, chapters that deal with broad based governance reforms aimed at improving state capacity like bureaucracy, political leadership, decentralisation, reimagining institutions and interactions between the state and society. The book has some excellent prescriptions like practicum based management of personnel, moving towards a three worker model in Anganwadis and focusing on community health vis-a-vis curative care. To me the most important message from the book is the need for greater decentralisation. The amount of control State and Union governments in India exert on policy implementation is unheard of not only in advanced democracies like Europe & US but also in supposedly centralised countries like China.
Muralidharan’s understanding of Government functioning is deep and his understanding of macro issues that negatively impact government performance is incisive. He does not look at problems with biases that many scholars and commentators often betray. Instead he tries to develop solutions through deep diagnoses of problems followed by carefully narrowing down what is doable in the Indian context. As a public servant myself it is heartening to see someone of Dr. Muralidharan’s influence help start a public debate on issues that people within the government have long wanted.
While some of the ideas like Ranked Choice Voting discussed in the book might seem radical, majority of the policy suggestions are eminently implementable. Dr Muralidharan keenly observes that more of state action does not necessarily mean more red tape. The Indian state has been and is capable of being a tremendous force for good. Among all the points that he tries to drive home the most crucial to me is that we don’t necessarily have to increase expenditure in any particular sector to achieve improved performance, we need to improve the efficiency and quality of every rupee spent to achieve desired success.
The Book aims at reaching out to a wide range of possible readers and is therefore written in an extremely easy to read style unlike Muralidharan’s academic work which is dense and highly technical. The author urges all sections of citizens including the Indian elite to engage with governance reforms and establish positive feedback loops.
