How India Stumbled
Can New Delhi Get Its Groove Back?
Article Summary and Author Biography
Just a few years ago, India seemed on the brink of becoming the world’s next great power. Today, its future appears less certain. Although some have blamed the global economic recession, the real problem is domestic -- namely, the centralized, secretive, and arbitrary political culture that pervades New Delhi.
PRATAP BHANU MEHTA is President of the Center for Policy Research, a New Delhi–based think tank.
Snapshot
Most explanations of the massive blackout in India point to extraordinary circumstances and inadequate supplies of electricity. In fact, the central and state governments' mismanagement of the supplies that do exist deserves much of the blame.
Democracy inaction: parliamentarians in New Delhi, August 2010 (Jim Young / Courtesy Reuters)
When the United Progressive Alliance, a group of center-left parties led by the Indian National Congress, came to power for a second term in 2009, it seemed that India could do no wrong. The economy had sailed through the worst of the global economic recession with GDP growing at a fast seven percent annually and accelerating (it reached 10.4 percent in 2010). Inflation was low, officials were finally starting to take India's social problems seriously, and politics in the world's largest democracy were contentious but robust. The rest of the world was even looking to the country as a serious global power. "India is not simply emerging," U.S. President Barack Obama told the Indian parliament in November 2010; "India has emerged."
Just two years later, however, India's growth is slackening, its national deficit is growing, and inflation is rising after having fallen between early 2010 and early 2012. Plans to build a more inclusive nation are in disarray. Income inequality has risen. According to the economists Laveesh Bhandari and Suryakant Yadav, the urban Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality, with zero indicating absolute equality and one indicating absolute inequality) went from 0.35 in 2005 to 0.65 today. And access to basic services, such as water, health care, and sanitation, remains woefully inadequate. Meanwhile, the country's democracy putters along, but in the absence of leadership, policymaking has ground to a halt. India seems to have gone from a near-sure thing to, as the financial analyst Ruchir Sharma put it in Breakout Nations, a 50-50 bet...
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