India’s tentative economic miracle faces many hurdles, but one of the chief difficulties is sustaining the political impetus for reform. This is rendered more difficult by the fact that growth has been unbalanced both across states and between urban and rural areas. Compared with other populous Asian nations, India’s progress on poverty reduction looks dismal.1 Understanding the cause of unbalanced growth, the factors that hasten or impede the convergence of regions, and the process by which growth trickles down, are important questions.
In India Emerging: The Reality Checks, Veena Jha addresses these questions. Her main conclusion is that while economic growth in India has trickled down in the post- reform period, it has trickled down slowly. An important message of the book is that there is little evidence that government policy has accelerated the process of the trickle down to the informal sector and the poor.