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June 4 - October 22, 2024
The core challenge of service delivery in India has been succinctly summarized by Manish Sabharwal, who has noted that: ‘The government has an execution deficit, the private sector has a trust deficit, and civil society has a scale deficit.’
shifting our focus from how budgets are allocated to how effectively they are spent will allow us to sharply accelerate both development and growth
The political apathy towards police reforms has been well captured in the opening epigraph of the Malimath Committee Report on Criminal Justice Reforms. It starts by quoting a French thinker who observed that: ‘Everything has been said already, but as no one listens, we must always begin again!’
policymakers only focus on public safety issues following heinous violent incidents that draw disproportionate media and public attention. Responses to such incidents are often ad hoc and driven by the need to appear to be taking action, as opposed to doing things that are most likely to be effective.
The number of sanctioned judge positions in India is twenty judges per million people, which is very low to begin with. In comparison, it is 51 in the UK, and 107 in the US.8 Thus, per capita judicial capacity in the UK is two and a half times higher than in India, and five times higher in the US.
The 2016 Access to Justice Survey conducted by Daksh, a non-profit legal think-tank, estimates that the annual direct cost for individual litigants of engaging with the court system is 0.48 per cent of India’s GDP. This is nearly seven times the total spending on the judiciary, which is 0.07 per cent of the GDP.
The idea is quite similar to the electronic ticketing system used to manage the pilgrim flow for darshan at the Tirupati temple, which reduced the average time spent waiting in line by pilgrims from twelve hours to one or two hours.31 If the Lord of Seven Hills can use an electronic ticketing system to reduce the waiting time for devotees by a factor of ten, surely the lords of our courts can do the same for supplicants seeking justice!
Akshay Jaitly and Ajay Shah explain this point by noting that we do not have ice cream shortages in summer, despite higher demand then, because we allow market prices to rise to reflect changes in supply and demand. In contrast, we constantly have power shortages in the summer because we try to control prices in ways that make it unattractive for producers to increase supply.17
The term social safety ‘net’ reflects the idea that life is unpredictable, and people are vulnerable, and so society should build a safety net to catch them when they fall. However, the ‘net’ metaphor implies a state of absorption where people are protected from falls but stay stuck in the net. Rather, our approach to social safety should be to provide support in ways that help people bounce back from adversity or climb out of poverty, but not in ways that they prefer to remain in the net or are unable to leave it.
For instance, the NREGS is only available in rural areas, and the PDS was historically not portable, and only accessible in one’s home area ration shop. Thus, migrants have to give up access to the two most important social welfare benefits. Further, agricultural subsidies are only available in rural areas, which also induces people to not migrate. On the other side of the equation, we also deter migration through under-investment in urban rental housing and other urban amenities. Yet, the fact that people still choose to migrate from rural areas highlights how much worse their prospects in
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Finance departments allocate budgets, but focus on the affordability of departmental requests rather than the implications of spending for growth. Commercial Tax departments focus on GST collections but not on promoting economic growth. State Planning departments typically focus on collating data and reports, and play limited roles in policy formulation or coordination. Departments of Labour monitor compliance with labour laws but do not focus on creating new jobs. Rural Development departments have programmes for rural livelihood generation, but often overlook that aiding rural-to-urban
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Currently, India’s education system produces degree-holders and exam takers without real skills because the largest and most lucrative employer hires based on degrees and exam-taking ability, and not based on skills!
The problem is that many of our misguided policies try to protect jobs instead of protecting workers.
a robust social protection infrastructure should not be thought of as charity, but as providing a foundation for a dynamic economy that is ethically just, economically efficient, and politically sustainable.
As a simpler example, consider three candidates (A, B, and C) who receive thirty-six, thirty-four, and thirty votes respectively out of a hundred. However, twenty out of the thirty supporters of C prefer B to A, and rank B as their second-choice vote. Under the status quo, A would win with just thirty-six votes. But under an RCV system, C would drop out after the first round, and twenty of their thirty votes would be awarded to B and the remaining ten to A. Thus, in the second round, B would win with fifty-four votes against forty-six for A.
Abraham Lincoln described democracy as a government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’. Our democracy is good at being ‘by’ the people (through elections), but weak on being ‘of’ the people (elites are much more likely to contest), and ‘for’ the people (private interests of politicians often diverge from the public interest).
The elite bias of the police is best captured by former DGP Prakash Singh, who has noted that ‘police in India are primarily used to serve the ruling class, and not the citizens’.
while a market transaction makes both sides better off, the market does not question the justice (or lack thereof) of the initial position at the start of that transaction.
while the democratic ideal is ‘one person, one vote’, markets treat people on a ‘one rupee, one vote’ principle.
The book’s approach reflects the idea that effective leaders ‘campaign in poetry, but govern in prose’.
Specifically, the poor can contribute by being more empowered, middle classes by being more engaged in civic life and shaping the public sphere, and elites by being more ethical—lobbying not just for themselves, but for the collective goods and governance reforms that will make all Indians better off.
