The Book Review Literary Trust, in collaboration with HarperCollins, hosted a lecture and conversation at the India International Centre (Annexe), New Delhi, on 14 December 2025. The event was centred on A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey by Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian. The programme, chaired by the distinguished editor of Business Standard TN Ninan, brought together the authors and the two panelists, Chief Economic Advisor, Government of India, Dr. V. Anantha Nageswaran, and Yamini Aiyar, a well-known author and political commentator, for a public engagement that comprised a formal lecture followed by an extended conversation addressing the book’s central themes.
Professor Devesh Kapur began by explaining that he would highlight the broad features of the book, before turning to what he described as a set of ‘6 surprising facts’ about India and pathologies that would help understand them. The book, he noted, is built around four defining features. First, interdisciplinarity. Second, a commitment to data over priors. The authors, he said, ‘were determined to first create data sets over six or seven decades across a wide range of variables’, allowing patterns to emerge from empirical evidence rather than fitting facts to preconceived narratives. Third, a deep archival engagement. To construct this empirical base, the authors examined more than 3,000 official government reports spanning seven decades. Crucially, this was not done to judge the past with hindsight. As Kapur put it, they did not want to understand and explain the past with what we might call the condescension of posterity. Rather, the aim was to understand the constraints faced by policymakers at that particular time. Fourth, comparative framework. Comparison operates on multiple axes: across time, across Indian States, across countries, and across stages of development. ‘There’s no point comparing India with the US now but to compare India with the US when the US had a similar per capita income which would be in the late 19th century might make a lot more sense.’
Turning to the book’s substantive findings, Kapur posited: ‘You cannot have development without order.’ What distinguishes India, he argued, is that it achieved a remarkable degree of political order without large-scale mass violence. This makes India a global outlier in the history of state and nation-building. While daily violence often dominates contemporary headlines, the relevant comparison is with mass violence—civil wars, revolutions, and systemic internal conflict. ‘If you think of the US Civil War,’ he noted, ‘which killed more than two per cent of the population, that would translate to around 30 million deaths in India.’ China’s experience was even more dramatic, with 40 to 50 million people killed in the 1950s and 60s. Against this backdrop, India’s post-Independence trajectory stands out. Apart from Partition—much of which occurred before the modern Indian state fully came into being—India avoided large-scale violence. This, he argued, is an achievement that ‘we don’t fully appreciate.’
A key explanation, according to the book, lies in India’s early adoption of universal franchise. Granting universal adult suffrage at extremely low levels of income and literacy was historically unprecedented. A second major finding concerns the performance of India’s public sector. While its inefficiencies are widely acknowledged, Professor Kapur noted that ‘no one had really put together data to precisely measure its performance’. Drawing on over five decades of data, the authors estimate that public sector underperformance cost India between 1.5 and 2 per cent of GDP annually for nearly half a century. The burden was particularly severe at the State level. Had State-level public enterprises earned even modest rates of return, India’s public health spending could have been ‘100 per cent higher’. Similarly, had central public sector enterprises performed adequately, investment in public infrastructure could have been ‘75 to 100 per cent higher’.
Importantly, this is not merely a historical story. ‘More central public sector undertakings have been created in the Modi years than in the Nehru years,’ Kapur observed—84 compared to 70. In real terms, investment in public sector enterprises during the Modi period amounted to ₹ 22 lakh crore (in 2024 prices), compared to roughly ₹ 1 lakh crore during the Nehru years. While this represents a smaller share of GDP today, the scale remains significant. The major difference lies in composition: whereas earlier public sector expansion focused on manufacturing, recent decades have seen a shift toward infrastructure and energy.
The third fact Kapur addressed concerned India’s peculiar form of centralization. Public debates, he noted, typically frame centralization as a struggle between New Delhi and the States. However, comparative analysis tells a different story. Among the world’s three largest countries—India, China, and the United States—India is the outlier. In both China and the United States, most public employees are located either at the federal or local levels. In India, by contrast, the overwhelming concentration is at the State level. ‘The real centralisation problem,’ he argued, ‘is not between tier one and tier two, but between tier two and tier three.’ Despite constitutional amendments meant to empower local governments, particularly the 73rd and 74th Amendments, States have largely retained control. As a result, local governments remain weak, underfunded, and administratively hollow. This structural imbalance, he suggested, explains persistent failures in the delivery of everyday public goods—whether pavements, public libraries, primary healthcare, education, or urban transport.
In his intervention, Arvind Subramanian introduced what he described as a ‘fourth surprise’ emerging from long-term empirical engagement with India’s growth trajectory. Reflecting on years of research, he noted that much of the conventional discourse on India’s development is shaped by a persistent sense of inadequacy—‘we always lament… wish India were like China, we could get things done better.’ Subramanian pointed out that a substantial portion of India has, in fact, performed in a manner comparable to China. ‘The surprising fact we found,’ he observed, ‘is that one third of India, namely the peninsular States, the South, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Haryana, comprising one third of India’s population, grew almost as fast and almost as long as China did.’ The implication of this insight, according to Subramanian, is analytically and politically significant.
The central question shifts away from external emulation toward internal comparison. Instead of asking why India has not become China, the more pertinent question becomes: ‘Why can’t the two-thirds of India learn from the one-third of India that’s been growing like China?’
Describing the fifth surprising fact, ‘If you look at the period between 1990 and today,’ he observed, ‘this is one of the periods where India grew very rapidly even in cross-country terms.’ Yet, as Subramanian emphasized, the Indian experience sharply defied this expectation. ‘You would think that because of rapid growth, taxes would surge and boom and you would get fiscal stability,’ he noted. Instead, the empirical reality pointed in the opposite direction. ‘It turns out that between 1991 and today, India’s fiscal deficit—Centre and States combined—is the highest amongst comparator emerging market countries.’ In other words, despite high growth, India emerged as ‘one of the weakest fiscal states’ in the developing world.
This contradiction forms the core of what Subramanian described as India’s distinctive fiscal puzzle. To explain it, he and his co-author advance the idea of what they term ‘India’s Kamadhenu fiscal state’. Drawing on the metaphor of the mythical cow that endlessly provides nourishment, he argued that the Indian state has evolved into one that ‘abundantly suckles, indiscriminately suckling all manner of vested interests.’
On the revenue side, he noted, the tax base remains strikingly narrow. ‘If you look at the tax regime, almost everyone is kept out,’ he observed—‘not just the poor, [but] the middle class, the rich, landed property, rich farmers—you can go on and on.’ Simultaneously, on the expenditure side, inclusion is equally expansive. ‘Everyone, every group, is kind of generously included,’ he said, producing chronic fiscal pressure rather than consolidation.
In what he described as the ‘sixth surprise’, Arvind Subramanian turned to the increasingly contentious question of fiscal federalism in India—a domain that has, in recent years, become a flashpoint of political tension, particularly between the Union and the southern States. At the analytical level, he located the issue within the logic of fiscal federalism. ‘If you think of India as a fiscal federal state, he explained, ‘of course there will be—and should be—transfers from the richer States to the poorer States.’ Such redistribution, he stressed, is intrinsic to the idea of nation-building. Yet the empirical reality, when examined closely, reveals a more complex and counterintuitive picture. While intergovernmental transfers have indeed increased steadily since the 2000s and have now broadly stabilized, the political geography of grievance does not align neatly with the actual direction of these transfers. ‘The biggest beneficiaries,’ he noted, ‘are the Hindi heartland and the East.’ However, ‘the biggest donors are not the southern States—they’re actually the western States and Haryana.’ This empirical mismatch, he suggested, forces a rethinking of how federal grievances are understood and articulated. The implication is significant. If the southern States are not, in fact, the largest net contributors, then the intensity of their discontent cannot be explained solely in fiscal terms.
Subramanian then turned to what he described as the deeper pathologies that underlie India’s persistent policy failures—patterns that help explain why inefficient arrangements endure despite clear evidence of underperformance. He began by posing a basic puzzle: ‘Why did we allow this? Why did we get into things and then were unable to exit from them, despite consistent under-performance?’ This question, he argued, applies to a wide range of domains—from public sector enterprises to subsidy regimes. Take, for instance, agricultural and power subsidies. ‘Sixty to seventy per cent of these subsidies go to the rich—rich farmers and rich households,’ he noted. And yet, paradoxically, these arrangements persist with remarkable political resilience. This persistence, Subramanian argued, cannot be explained by conventional ideological categories. ‘If all the subsidies are going to the rich,’ he observed, ‘then nothing about democracy or socialism explains why this continues.’ The explanation, he suggested, lies elsewhere—in what he terms India’s default ideology: mai-bapism. He defined this not simply as statism, but as a distinctive and deeply embedded worldview. ‘India’s default ideology is statism,’ he argued, ‘best understood in its Indian rendition—mai-bap sarkar.’ Crucially, this belief persists despite the state’s repeated failures.
‘Even though the state has not delivered,’ Subramanian observed, ‘it’s been the apathetic parent, the absentee landlord, the tormentor.’ Yet, paradoxically, when things go wrong, citizens instinctively turn back to the state. ‘Any failure that happens anywhere else, we always turn to the state for a solution.’ From this ideological foundation flows what he identified as the system’s operational logic, which is complexity. This was not an isolated anomaly but, in his view, emblematic of Indian governance. The same logic, he argued, underlies the fertilizer subsidy regime. Nobody in the world could invent a fertilizer regime as brilliantly creative as the Indian state. In closing, Subramanian invoked William Faulkner’s famous line: ‘The past is not dead. It is not even past.’
V. Anantha Nageswaran framed his engagement as an extension rather than a critique. Nageswaran set out the book’s core claim: ‘Their central argument is of course very powerful and elegant. India they argue is precocious twice over. A precocious democracy and a precocious economy … This precociousness of course, the authors argue, explains much of India’s paradox: sustained growth without commensurate structural transformation, political stability alongside persistent informality, aspirations racing ahead of capability.’ Nageswaran then voiced a pointed reservation about the incompleteness of the lens: ‘But I also believe this argument leaves out too much, not at the margins but at the core. To understand India’s trajectory, we need to widen the frame to history to culture, to firms, to citizens and to the asymmetric nature of development itself.’
Nageswaran described the first of India’s two ‘precocious’ characteristics: its democracy. He begins by situating the argument in stark historical terms: ‘First let’s look at the precocious democracy argument. India adopted the universal franchise at levels of income and literacy that were unprecedented in world history.’ He emphasized that this was not merely a constitutional choice, it was a civilizational gamble. In Nageswaran’s framing, the extension of universal suffrage radically reshaped India’s political order. It expanded political voice and participation far earlier than in comparable societies and did so in a context of extreme social and economic diversity. At the same time, he underscores the extraordinary strain this placed on the state. Quoting the authors’ own formulation, he notes: ‘They have captured the strain of these places on the state with a memorable phrase—democracy asked too much of too little too soon too often.’
For Nageswaran, this diagnosis is powerful, but not complete. For him, the question is not merely what choices were made, but how they were made and under what political conditions. He then turned to the ideological imprint of India’s early leadership, especially the first Prime Minister, arguing that this legacy decisively shaped the country’s development path: ‘These matter profoundly because the first Prime Minister’s ideological worldview, his fascination with Fabian socialism, state planning and technocratic control came to dominate the institutional architecture of the country.’
Nageswaran also highlighted one of the book’s strongest contributions: ‘Compared to East Asian countries India tried to suppress rural consumption, not rewarding rural productivity with commensurate wages in order to depress rural consumption.’ India, he argued, pursued a deeply flawed strategy: ‘We may have artificially suppressed rural consumption in order to generate savings and therefore exportable surpluses but India probably erred in not only suppressing rural consumption but also rural incomes in the process.’ This, he suggests, reopens the counterfactual question: ‘Now could this have been done differently had it not been a top-down development process under some other leadership under some other dispensation—that’s an important counterfactual to examine.’
Nageswaran then moved to the second major theme: India’s ‘precocious globalisation’.
Unlike East Asia’s industrial path, India’s integration into the global economy followed an unusual trajectory: ‘While East Asia moved from agriculture into labour-intensive manufacturing we of course globalised at the top. We exported engineers, doctors, nurses, software and professional services.’ He emphasized the anomaly of this path. From the 1980s onward, he notes: ‘India experienced one of the longest sustained growth accelerations in the developing world. Public sector roles diminished, private entrepreneurship flourished and aspirations rose.’ Yet this success generated its own contradictions: ‘It also produced structural tension. The high skill sector expanded rapidly but large sections of the workforce remained trapped in low productivity.’ This leads to what he identifies as the book’s central puzzle: ‘This brings us to what the authors describe as the central puzzle—why did India not grow the way East Asia did?’
At the core of Nageswaran’s critique is the idea that the book implicitly assumes asymmetry in development processes. This asymmetry, he argues, also applies to institutional evolution. Nageswaran then introduced what he considers the most significant omission in the book’s framework. He stressed that this is not a marginal gap but a foundational one: ‘There is a deeper omission in the book and perhaps it is the most consequential, near absence of cultural and cognitive explanations.’ He stated: ‘We are a highly context relational society. Our scriptures are transmitted orally not through written tradition. Our society is shaped by kinship, caste, religion and reputation-based trust.’ This has deep economic implications: ‘Economic coordination historically occurs through personal networks rather than impersonal contracts.’
Nageswaran then moved on to describe two further missing agents in the book’s analysis—actors whose absence limits explanatory power. ‘The last two areas of further work for them and for anybody else are the missing agents… They do touch upon the role of the Indian conglomerates and the difference with South Korea later in the book but the two omissions are about firms and citizens.’ He emphasized that firm behaviour has shaped outcomes in profound ways. This, he argues, fundamentally alters the developmental trajectory: ‘Therefore development is not delivered by the state alone. It requires firms willing to internalize national ambitions and invest patiently in people and capability.’
Nageswaran then turns to the second missing actor—citizens themselves: ‘And second, citizens. Citizens appear in this book as voters and beneficiaries, not as co-producers of public goods.’ He stressed that durable state capacity depends on civic behaviour as much as policy design. And he offered a powerful concluding synthesis: ‘To understand India’s development we must integrate, as the book has tried to do, founding politics, asymmetry, culture, firms, citizens and geopolitics—and not treat the state alone as the sole protagonist.’
Yamini Aiyar began by emphasizing that India’s present cannot be understood without attention to its institutional continuities: ‘We are where we are on account of a set of conjunctures. There are ruptures but there are also conjunctures. So we also need to understand those continuities in order to achieve the ruptures that we want for future progress.’ This absence of historical self-reflection, she argued, constitutes a deep failure across academia, policymaking, and public discourse. She emphasized the importance of the work and acknowledged the analytical contribution of its framing.
Turning to the central conceptual argument, she reflected on the idea of precociousness: ‘I think at the heart of what you’re talking about, this idea of precociousness which is at one level both thrilling for what we have achieved as a democracy that in very, very hostile conditions gave universal franchise and has stayed with at least the structure of its democracy with all its challenges, stayed with it through these 76 years, which makes it so unique and has also given us a precocious form of economic development.’ Yet she posed a critical question: ‘But it raises for me a question… did it have to be? Is precociousness the problem or precociousness our reality?’ She then turned to what she identified as a central concern—mai-bapism and the nature of the Indian state. She questioned whether India’s foundational choices created a state that was simultaneously powerful and distant. She illustrated this tension through the example of Swachh Bharat. Drawing on fieldwork, she noted: ‘Households that were coerced took the subsidy and did not use the toilets. And in general, the command of the state was simply not followed.’ She connected this to broader patterns of governance and participation: ‘Every local government election… people show up, they participate… Yet they don’t really expect the local government to do very much.’ ‘If even today the Central Finance Commission were not to be set up, every BJP Chief Minister would be out on the streets demanding it. For decades State Finance Commissions have not been set up… and frankly, no citizen has cared two hoots.’
On education, Aiyar observed a striking paradox: ‘By the mid-2000s gross enrolment rates have hit over 100. Where are most Indians going to get their education? They are all heading primarily towards the private sector.’ She extended this logic to health and environmental governance. She summarized the contradiction starkly: ‘Mai-bapism is the core ideology of Indian politics and the Indian state. But a lot of what society wants to do, it is doing outside the state altogether.’ She highlighted the paradox of a high-wage but thin state: ‘We have this very interesting compromise of a high-wage state… and yet everyone is comfortable with the thinness of the state … Why has this not become a source of political mobilization?’ Finally, she reflected on democracy and civil society. Democracy has also created sites of mobilization that have forced the state to do things it otherwise would not have done. The ASER movement is a perfect example. This would not have happened had democracy not created the conditions for a mobilized civil society.
Aiyar concluded by returning to Capitalism and legitimacy: ‘The failures of Indian private Capital and its very mai-bap relationship with the Indian state that has led to delegitimizing Capitalism although nobody really wants to go back to the old era of Socialism either which makes it hard to do some of the next generation reforms that we need to, to empower markets and ensure that all Indians are equal participants in the Indian economy.’
TN Ninan framed the discussion by reflecting on the paradox surrounding the book’s reception. He noted that while the work was intellectually substantial—a show-stopper in terms of the things it says—it had not received the attention it deserved in mainstream or social media. He described this as deeply unfortunate, remarking that ‘our social media has singularly failed to take this book seriously and not do the kind of thoughtful analysis or presentation that our two panelists have done today.’ For Ninan, this neglect reflected a broader trend of ‘anti-intellectualism’. He went on to pose two sharp questions. First, he suggested that the book seemed somewhat uneasy with contemporary political realities, asking whether it was grappling sufficiently with what he described as ‘a new or different India’ that may no longer align with the analytical frameworks of the past. Second, he raised the issue of India’s self-perception as a rising or even ‘premature’ superpower and questioned whether the notion of being a superpower itself proved to be premature.
Responding to these challenges, Devesh Kapur’s intervention was framed as both a response to earlier comments and a clarification of the analytical positions taken in the book. He stated, ‘India is not a superpower. On that we are unequivocal.’ He then turned to the broader issue of how India’s current position had come about, noting that the book had drawn criticism for what it omitted as much as for what it included. ‘There is no doubt that there are a range of issues that we have dealt with lightly,’ he acknowledged, listing environment, culture, entrepreneurship, research & innovation, and civil society and NGOs among the areas that could have been explored more fully. However, he emphasized the constraints of authorship: ‘After 750 pages, you have to decide. A book has to have an argument; it cannot have everything.’ Kapur then turned to what he described as a central omission: the insufficient treatment of the role of ideas in shaping India’s post-Independence trajectory. ‘We probably did not write in a sufficiently rigorous way about the importance of ideas in the 1950s,’ he admitted. This, he argued, was a decisive moment when the Indian state exercised extraordinary autonomy. ‘The choices were made—Capital-intensive industrialization, the neglect of agriculture, the suppression of domestic private enterprise,’ he noted. He stressed that while it was understandable that early leaders made certain choices given the global context of the time, what was less understandable was the persistence of those choices long after their limitations were clear later on. This persistence, he argued, reflected the transformation of ideas into entrenched interests: ‘When do ideas become ideologies, and when do ideologies become interests? Once they become vested interests, the ideas themselves vanish.’
Kapur then turned to the question of culture, acknowledging its relevance but cautioning against overstating its explanatory power. The author argued that culture matters, ‘but it is not destiny’. He then turned to the question of democracy and development, responding directly to points raised about decentralization and participation. ‘When we talk about precocious democracy,, he said, ‘there are two things that stand out.’ The first is land reform. No democratic government in the world has carried out serious land reform, he argued. All major land reforms happened under authoritarian regimes. The second concerned primary education. ‘In fact, in most countries, mass primary education expanded before universal franchise.’ Drawing these strands together, Kapur returned to the broader theme of structural failure. ‘We know the lack of land reform had long-term implications. We know the lack of primary education had long-term implications,’ he said. ‘Both we argue had something at least to do with the early choice of universal franchise.’
Arvind Subramanian responding to TN Ninan’s question stated, ‘If someone had told you ten months ago that the US would impose the highest tariffs on India and India would have higher tariffs than China, you would have laughed,’ he said. Yet, he argued, this reality revealed something fundamental: ‘It exposed our utter lack of negotiating power, strength, etc.,’ and underscored how exaggerated claims of India’s global standing had become. In his words, ‘the claims to superpower, let alone premature superpower, were vastly overstated and self-created within the ecosphere that has become the India of today.’
Professor Subramanian addressed critiques that the book underplays culture, society, and non-economic dimensions of development. He acknowledged the limitation while situating it within the book’s analytical intent: ‘I would say for all the critiques of the omissions of culture, etc., the only thing I would say in defence of the book is that precisely because development is so multifaceted, we should look not just at market and states, but society, and importantly, a section on nation, you know, what creates a nation, how do you sustain a nation, what are the implications.’
Addressing long-term performance, Subramanian acknowledged that India experienced periods of economic growth, but he cautioned against equating growth with transformation. The deeper puzzle, he argued, lies in the post-1980 period. Despite liberalization and access to global markets, India failed to undergo a deep structural transformation. ‘The puzzle is not why we didn’t get structural transformation in the time era. The puzzle is in the period after the 1980s… we had access to markets, and yet, despite that we didn’t grow in the way we should have.’ He clarified the distinction sharply: ‘We grew, but we didn’t have structural transformation.’ Turning to governance, Subramanian addressed debates on decentralization and federalism. While acknowledging the normative appeal of decentralization, he warned against treating it as a cure-all. He argued that performance often deteriorates as authority moves downward, citing weaknesses in State Finance Commissions, legislatures, and administrative institutions. This, he suggested, points to a broader problem of accountability: ‘There’s something about accountability at the second level which basically gets worse, and that’s probably true of all federal systems.’ Consequently, he cautioned against the assumption that decentralization automatically improves governance. In his concluding remarks, Subramanian turned to the contemporary embrace of cash transfers. While often celebrated as efficient and empowering, he viewed them as symptomatic of a deeper malaise. ‘It’s become the toy for all governments. This mutual accommodation, he argued, ‘produces a stable but stagnant equilibrium—an “unholy alliance” between citizens and the state that sustains low ambition and weak institutional performance.’
T.N. Ninan, reflecting on the richness of the discussion apologized for overrunning the allotted time, he remarked that the quality and intensity of the exchange made interruption difficult. The event concluded with a brief question-and-answer session on governance, trade, and economic development, followed by informal discussions over tea among speakers and participants.
* A Lecture and Conversation with Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian: A Report
Chaired by TN Ninan. Yamini Aiyar and V. Anantha Nageswaran were the discussants.
The Book Review Literary Trust,14 December 2025, India International Centre, New Delhi.
** Report prepared by Shagun Tomar