L07 Corbridge 2010

Introduction

India has been acclaimed in recent years as aninformation technology (IT) superpower andperhaps even as a major new player in the worldeconomy. The Indian economy has beengrowing at around 5 or 6 percent per annumsince 2003, adjusted for population growth, andthere are good reasons to suppose that similarrates of growth of gross domestic product(GDP) per capita might be sustainable over thenext 20 years. Savings rates are very high inIndia. Indeed, at just over 30 percent of GDp,gross domestic savings are approaching EastAsian levels. The economy sits well inside itstotal factor productivity frontier, in large partbecause oflow levels of human capital forma-tion, and the country now has the chance toreap a demographic dividend. The ratio ofdependants to workers is set to decline fromjust over 0.6 in 2000 to just under 0.5 in 2025.1

The launch in January 2008 of the Tata N anoseemed like icing on this cake of economicsuccess. Much was made in the west about a carselling for $2,500, but in India the marketing ofa car for Rs 1 lakh (100,000) spoke to theexistence of a mass middle class. It also signaledthe rise of a small group ofIndian capitalists andentrepreneurs who could bestride the globalstage. Four-lane highways packed with Nanos

21The political economy

of development in Indiasince Independence

Stuart Corbridge

offered a vision of India far removed from oneof pot-holed roads shared by bullock carts,scooters, and state-built Ambassador cars. In thewords of Gurcharan Das, India had beenunbound.e It had escaped from a Kafkaesqueworld of bureaucratic red tape to take its placein the global information age.

There are clearly nuggets of truth inaccounts of India's political economy thathinge around 1991, as Das's book largely does.Yet the notion that all was bad or sick before"the reforms," or that all has been good orhealthy since, fails to provide a nuanced pictureof economic development in India sinceindependence. Recent academic work pointsout that high rates of economic growth arenow being achieved in India in part because ofpast legacies, some more intended than others,and not wholly in spite of them. Investments inhigher education and basic industries are twocases in point.f Recent work also points outthat economic reform did not begin overnightin 1991, but was prefigured in importantrespects by the pro-business agendas pursuedby Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and RajivGandhi in the 19805. In any case, the realturning point in India's trend rate of economicgrowth was 1980-81, not the early 1990s,although there are signs that the trend rate hasimproved again since 2003-04.4

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We also need to acknowledge that post-reform growth in India has reduced absolutepoverty less quickly than might have beenexpected, particularly through the 1990s. Theincidence of absolute poverty is much less nowthan it was at the end of the 1970s, whensomething like 50 percent ofIndians were poor,but a Tata Nano driven from Delhi to Kolkatastill takes its riders through the epic enter ofworld poverty.The government ofIndia (GOI)uses a particularly brutal measure of absolutepoverty, one that is more basic even than the"one dollar a day" definition used by the lead-ing multilateral institutions.f Yet even on thismeasure some 260 million people in India arefinding it hard to keep body and soul together-fewer than 100 million people less, in totalnumbers, than the figure 0£350 million in 1980.

Social and spatial inequalities have alsoincreased sharply since 1990. Rising inequalitylevels are inevitable in a country escaping alow-level equilibrium trap, a point made bySimon Kuznets many decades ago." We canrefer to "good inequality" where it is based onhigher rewards to talent and entrepreneurship.But there is also "bad inequality," and thisoccurs when people are locked out of markets,or from the schools, roads and other routesthat lead to the acquisition of human capitaland other transferable skills, perhaps on thebasis of gender or caste or ethnicity. Whatis worrying about recent developments inIndia is the abundance of bad inequality andunemployment. Governments continue toinvest meagerly in the provision of publicgoods, particularly in the eastern part of thecountry. Naxalism is one index of pervasivegovernment failure in a group of states runningsouth from Bihar to Andhra Pradesh. For ruralpeople in these states, as the World Bank hasrecently reminded us, living standards are abouton a par with living standards in rural areas ofsub-Saharan Africa." They are a long wayremoved from the living standards of India'surban middle classes. In contrast, as the WorldBank also points out, the richer parts of NewDelhi, Mumbai,and Bangalore can reasonablybe described as India's "Latin Americas,"

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These inequalities are holding back eco-nomic and social development in post-reformIndia. They led John Harriss and me toconclude that economic reform in India in the1990s had taken the form of an "elite revolt"against those aspects of the dirigiste state thatmost constrained a loose coalition of businessgroups and the urban middle classes.8 Thatrevolt has wrought some important andmuch needed changes in India's economy. Ithas also helped to rework key political relationsbetween the central state and the provinces andbetween the state and its citizens. But thereform process remains highly uneven, both inits mainsprings and in its consequences. I shallargue here that the term "elite revolt" stillworks well as a descriptor of the contradictorydynamics of political and economic change inIndia over the past two decades.

Political economy of growth inIndia, 1950-80

When the British quit India in 1947 they leftbehind an economy scarred by two centuriesduring which first preference was given toimperial interests. It is true that the Britishinvested heavily in a railway system that linkedmost of the major towns and cities in SouthAsia. They also sank considerable sums ofmoney into the canal colonies of Punjab andprovided new systems of property rights andcommercial law in both rural and urban areas.The British could even maintain in 1947 thatthey had built India into the world's tenthlargest industrial power. There were largetextile industries in Ahmedabad and Bombay,and an iron and steel industry in Bihar andOrissa (thanks mainly to Jamsetji Tata). Butwhat this rosy picture neglects is the involutionof the countryside in Bengal that followed thePermanent Settlement of 1793-a settlementthat promoted rack-renting landlordism ratherthan capitalist farming-and the underminingof many of India's craft industries as importsflooded in from Lancashire and elsewhere. Thegrim truth of British misrule was apparent in a

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series of famines that hit India at the end of thenineteenth century, and which culminated inthe deaths of three million people in the Bengalfamine of 1943-44.Alan Heston has estimatedthat average living standards in the Indiancountryside barely improved from 1900 to1947.9 There were always significant regionalvariations within this general picture, but it islikely that as many as two in three Indians livedin absolute poverty at the mid-point of thetwentieth century.

Against this backdrop, and given the loss in1947 of the jute economy of East Bengal (nowBangladesh), as well as the loss of the major portcity of Karachi, it is not surprising that India'sfirst plans for economic development tookshape in an atmosphere of crisis. The first five-year plan (1951-56) was something of a dampsquib and remained broadly neutral as betweenthe agricultural and non-agricultural sectors.After the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi inJanuary 1948, the remaining "tall men" ofIndia's nationalist elite were forced to occupythemselves mainly with nation building in abroader sense, with Sardar Patel working hardto ensure the de facto integration of India's 565princely states into the new republic, whileB. R.Ambedkar and Jawaharlal N ehru oversawwork on the constitution. It was clear by 1950that India would be a federal democraticrepublic in which universal suffrage would becoupled to the establishment of a central statewith considerable executive and emergencypowers and matching geographical reach.Ambedkar and N ehru agreed that the socialand economic modernization of India wouldhave -to be secured by vigorous planned actionsemanating from New Delhi. Conservativepoliticians sitting in the states would need to bedisciplined by wiser and more far sighted mensitting in the country's capital. Modernizationwas conceived as a diffusion process whereingreat pulses of social and economic change-ultimately liberating and uplifting, if oftendisruptive of established ways of being in theshort run-would push outwards from India'smajor cities to its smallest towns before reachinginto the countryside.l"

Ambedkar would break with N ehru overthe failure of his government to transfer surpluslands specifically to so-called untouchable (ordalit) families.Ambedkar had warned at the endof the Constituent Assembly debates that Indiawas about "to enter a life of contradictions. Inpolitics we will have equality and in social andeconomic life we will have inequality." In hisview, the failure to redistribute landed wealthin India would put" our democracy in peril."!'It seems likely that Nehru shared this view,although he had more faith than Ambedkar inthe economically empowering effects ofpolitical equality. In any case, by 1951 N ehruwas unchallenged in his leadership of theIndian National Congress. His ascendancyfollowed the death of Pate I in December 1950and the defeat of Patel's close supporter,Purushottam Das Tandon, in a struggle for thepresidency of the Indian National Congress.But Nehru still had to secure consent for hisproject of social and economic modernization,and this meant that he had to deal withprecisely those state Congress bosses whowould conspire against his plans for land-to-the-tiller land reforms in the 1950s.12

In retrospect, we can see that N ehru soughtto manage the modernization of India bypursuing a development model that wasbeing widely touted by economists even asthe second five-year plan was drafted. Earlydevelopment economics took shape in the1940s and 1950s around three key ideas. First,there was a critique of comparative advantagetheory. Hans Singer and Raoul Prebisch tookissue with the idea that latecomer countriescould develop effectively as primary goodsproducers.l ' There were both theoretical andempirical reasons to suppose that prices ofnon-primary goods rose faster over timethan the prices of primary commodities.Developing countries had to build up local(infant) industries as a priority, even if thismeant erecting tariff barriers to protect thedomestic econorny.!" Second, this commit-ment to import substitution industrialization(ISI) implied in the short term a run of balanceof trade deficits. Developing countries first had

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to import the machine tools and other goodsthat would help them build up local manu-facturing capacity. A foreign exchange con-straint would become especially compelling ina country like India where ISI privileged theproduction of capital goods (iron and steel,chemicals, heavy engineering, etc). Flows offoreign direct investment were thin on theground in the 1950s and 1960s, and probablywould not have been very welcome in India.A surplus on the capital account would thushave to be achieved by large and continuinginflows of foreign aid. Nehru's ability toposition India at the head of the nonalignedmovement helped in this respect. India was ableto build a steel mill at Bokaro (Bihar) withassistance from the USSR and another atRourkela (Orissa) with help from WestGermany. Third, the very scarcity of foreignexchange in the 1950s and 1960s, coupled withpoorly formed local stock markets and oftenweak private trading systems (some of whichwere coded as "oppressive" or exploitative),inclined the Government of India (GO I) tothink of economic development as a projectthat had to be planned for and delivered by abeneficent state. Ronald Inden exaggeratesonly a little when he says that, in the Nehru-Mahalonobis universe, planning came tosubstitute for religion as the new godhead.PNehru's faith in reason and modernitycomplemented a more general mid-centuryfaith in technology and progress, both of whichneeded support from good (or at any ratestrong) government.

Thus conceived, India's model of develop-ment through most of the 1950s and 1960smade a virtue of deferred gratification. N ehruand Mahalanobis believed that high rates ofeconomic growth would depend on high ratesof personal and government savings (equiva-lent to present consumption foregone), andtheir efficient mobilization for purposes oflarge-scale industrialization. By definition, thisfirst wave of capital goods-based productionwould not be labor intensive; it would notcreate large numbers of goods for the under-employed peasants who wished (or needed) to

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leave the countryside to find more productivejobs in the modern sector. This Lewisiantransformation would have to await the secondstage of India's industrial revolution.l? Cheapsteel, chemicals and power could then beplugged into a plethora of efficient Indian-runcompanies that would produce bikes, radios,two-wheel tractors and such like for the finalconsumer.

Put another way, the Nehru-Mahalanobismodel presupposed that India would begoverned by a developmental state, of the sortthat would soon take shape in East or SoutheastAsia.This would be a state that was relativelyautonomous of privileged local classes, asMarxist theoreticians liked to put it. InIndia, it would be embodied in the planningcommission and the five-year plans. The statewould specify a social welfare function for thefuture (5, 10, 15 or 25 years away) and thendevise the best economic and statisticalinstruments to match inputs to outputs. Themodel further supposed that the GOI couldfunnel resources from the agricultural sector tothe non-agricultural sector without provokinga backlash among India's rural population.Nehru believed that he could square this circlein two main ways: first, by making use of foodaid from the US, and second, by means ofland ceilings legislation that would break upunproductive estates and enfranchise efficientsmall farmers. India's countryside would bebought off not with state funds, but withresources from abroad and by institutionalreform at home. Agriculture was the "bargainbasement" that would free up scarce resourcesfor use elsewhere in the developing economy. 17

Except it did not, or not as N ehru had hoped.By the early 1960s it was apparent that

increases in grain production were barelykeeping pace with population growth. Foodsupply growth in the 1950s came mainly fromincreases in the area under cultivation, andnow the land frontier was closing. By themid-1960s many farmers were bemoaningtheir lot. The great jat farmers' leader, CharanSingh, had opposed N ehru's plans for coopera-tive farming in the 1950s. In 1967, he defected

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT IN INDIA SINCE INDEPENDENCE

from the Congress, setting up the BharatiyaKranti Dal in 1969. Charan Singh,in his exten-sive writings on agriculture and agriculturalpolicy in India, anticipated Michael Lipton'slater claim that India was suffering from highlevels of urban bias.1S Government spendingdecisions were denounced as inequitable,inefficient and unsustainable. In a countrywhere more than 75 percent of the people stilllived in the countryside-agriculture's share ofGDP was as high as 58 percent in 1950, and notmuch less than 50 percent in the mid-1960s-it made little sense to waste capital on inefficienturban and industrial projects.The need insteadwas to fund new irrigation systems and off-farm employment growth in the countryside.

This view gained currency at the end of the1960s, following the failures of the 1965 and1966 monsoons and in the wake of new datashowing that the incidence of absolute povertyin the Indian countryside had increasedbetween 1961 and 1969.19 Nehru died beforethe crisis of India's agriculture was fullyexposed and before the suspension of planningin 1966-69. But his death also came after adisastrous war with China in 1962, and theseevents taken in the round would continue toinfect the poisonous political and economicatmospheres in which first Lal Bahadur Shastri(1964-66) and then Indira Gandhi had tomake their way as prime ministers.

Indira Gandhi has many times been com-pared unfavorably with her father (Nehru),and very often for good reason. She deservesto be condemned above all for the disastrousway that she fought religious fire with fire inPunjab in the early 1980s, when she covertlysupported Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale,and for her government's suspension of demo-cratic rule in India during the Emergency(1975-77).But what is sometimes forgotten inthese comparisons is that Mrs Gandhi came topower at a time when India's democracy wasdeepening, when the dominance of theCongress system was for the first time beingchallenged in New Delhi and the states, andwhen state-society relations more generally, inthe words ofLloyd and Susanne Rudolph, had

moved from a pattern of "command politics"to one of" demand politics."2o The new poli-ticallandscape of the 1970s and 1980s saw notonly the deinstitutionalization of Congress andthe rise of credible opposition parties; it alsomarked a period in India's political economywhen a prospectively developmental stateimploded.F' That state had always been anuneasy construct in India, as Partha Chatterjeeand Sudipta Kaviraj have several timesreminded us.22Nehru mobilized large sectionsof the English-speaking "progressive" elite insupport of his modernizing agenda. But thiselite was fated to see its ambitions translated atlocal level by power brokers who rarely sharedits commitments to the "greater good" or the"long run." Local worlds were more oftenvernacular worlds, or worlds where commit-ments were most often forged at the level of ahousehold, kin group or caste community. AsKaviraj so memorably puts it, India's highmodernist state "had feet of vernacular clay."23

Worse, the developmental state model pre-supposes an executive state that is autonomousfrom a country's dominant proprietary elites.Such was the case, for example, in Taiwan,where the ruling elite after 1949 was trans-planted from mainland China and was laterfunded asmuch by the US as by rental incomesfrom land. "Land-to-the-tiller" land reformworked in Taiwan,just as it did in South Koreain the 1950s. Regime changes ensured that adevelopmental state was not confronted byentrenched powers elsewhere in the land. InIndia, in contrast, as scholars as diverse asFrancine Frankel, Pranab Bardhan, and JagdishBhagwati have all shown, the developmentalstate was captured by three interlockinggroups: India's richer farmers (who blockedagrarian reform), its industrial bourgeoisie(business houses that took advantage of state-induced scarcities and blocked competitionand innovation), and the country's leadingbureaucrats (many of whom earned large rentalincomes from the "permit-license-quota Raj"built up around ISI, and almost all of whomenforced unproductive rent-seeking behavioron smaller businesses and ordinary citizens). 24

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The so-called "Hindu rate of growth" thatdogged India in the 1970s reflected the squeezeplaced on the country's developmental state byaggressively sectional interests. The state wasnow forced to accommodate to the demandsof these interest groups, no matter whetherthey acted for the greater good or not. AverageGDP growth in the 1970s was 2.9 percent perannum, which was barely positive in per capitaincome terms. In some accounts, too, thegreater costs of participating in India'scompetitive politics led some politicians tofinance their campaigns illegally and/orthrough abuses of office. Civil servants, forexample, were forced to stump up greater rentsto acquire a desirable posting, or to head off anundesirable one. Criminals, for their part,moved into politics, both to milk the systemand to head off unwelcome attention from thejustice system. The criminalization of politicsbecame particularly marked in parts of northIndia from the 1970s and posed yet anotherbarrier to economic reform there.

Lobbying, of course, is endemic to allpolitical systems, and what is called lobbyingin Washington or London is all·too routinelydescribed as corruption in New Delhi orDhaka. Corruption also comes in many forms,and when it takes the form of speed moneypayments it can grease the wheels of aneconomic system that otherwise tends toatrophy or entropy. And it is at this systemiclevel, as economic reformers like Bhagwati andSrinivasan have consistently pointed out, thatthe bigger picture lies. 25 The failure of theCongress party in the 1950s and 1960s tosupport an executive/developmental state leftIndia's economy between two stools. On theone hand, the state was not strong enough toforce the commanding heights of the economyto be lean and mean, let alone to dispense withthe subsidies and protectionist barriers thatwere meant to provide them with temporarysupport. Neither management nor organizedlabor believed that governments in the 1970sor 1980s had the guts to get tough with them.On the other hand, the central role occupiedby the state in India's productive economy-

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from steel to cars to banking-was so great thatit suffocated innovation and new startups inthe organized private sector. Even into themid-1980s, India's leading industrial houseswere happy to connive in the reproduction ofthis world of the second or third best. For thatto change, or so this argument goes, thecontradictions of dirigiste development in Indiawould necessarily come to a head, as they didwith the fiscal and balance of payments crisesof the early 1990s. Only then would politiciansand leading businesspeople in India be forcedto reform the economy and the systems ofpolitics that had supported economic mIS-management on a grand scale.

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Political economy of reformin India

As ever, it is not difficult to recognize the truthof some of these claims. But what this narrativeof rise, decline and recovery cannot account foris the upturn in India's rate of economic growthpost-1980. The fact is that per capita incomesin India grew on average at 3.8 percent in the1980s, or at more or less the same rate as theygrew in the 1990sThere are three main reasonswhy this was so.To begin with, asAtul Kohli hasargued, the governments ofIndira Gandhi andRajiv Gandhi (1980-89) began to tilt eco-nomic policy more clearly in the direction ofbig business.r'' The courting of foreign directinvestment was still not a priority through the1980s, although a few joint ventures werebrokered in the autos sector. Nevertheless, thestrongly anti-capital (especially, anti-foreigncapital) rhetoric that Indira Gandhi haddeployed in the 1970s was toned down. Newinitiatives were introduced that favoredestablished Indian producers. In place of garibihatao (an end to poverty), the political platformon which Indira Gandhi made her name in theearly 1970s, the Congress governments ofthe 1980s retired those parts of the Monopoliesand Trade Practices Act that made it hard forbig business to expand in core sectors likechemicals and cement. Some efforts were also

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT IN INDIA SINCE INDEPENDENCE

made to liberalize credit for large companies.Perhaps most importantly, both Indira andRajiv Gandhi took steps to tame labor activismin the organized sector, and to encourageprivate sector investments with limited taxconcessions.

Kohli argues that a major effect of thesepolicy changes was to shift the balance ofcapital formation in India through the 1980s.Albeit at the margin, it was the privatecorporate sector that now began to contributemore to economic development, while capitalformation in the public sector stabilized aftera period of rapid growth in the 1970s. It seemslikely, too, that the growth-inducing effects ofa pro-business tilt were augmented by thegradual diffusion of Green Revolution tech-nologies out of Punjab, Haryana, and parts ofsouth India.West Bengal now became a GreenRevolution heartland, following significantgovernment investment in irrigation andelectricity supply.

Poor people in the countryside generallyescape from poverty by migrating to towns orcities, or by winning more work in thecountryside at higher real wage rates. There issome evidence that labor markets tightened inthe 1980s in several states, including WestBengal, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka. By1989-90, the percentage of people in Indialiving in absolute income poverty had reducedto just under 39 percent from 51 percent in1977-78.The GOI in the early 2000s liked toclaim that the rate of poverty reduction accele-rated after the reforms of 1991. Most scholars,however, have discounted the suggestion of the55th round of the National Sample Survey(NSS) that just 26 percent of people wereabsolutely poor in 1999-2000-an astonishingdecline of 10 percent from six years earlier The55th round of the NSS broke with the long-established convention of estimating householdspending on a uniform reporting period basis.Under this system, respondents recall theirspending on all items over a period of 30 days.The 55th round instead introduced a mixedreporting period of weeks, months, and years.This made sense for all sorts of reasons (greater

accuracy of recall, most notably), but it under-mined the GO I's efforts to track poverty trendson a consistent basis.Adjustments made to the55th round data by Angus Deaton and JeanDreze suggest that the rate of poverty reductionin the 1990s was probably no greater than therate of poverty reduction in the 1980s.27

Others, notably Abhijit Sen and Himanshu,have argued that the 1990s was a lost decadefor poverty reduction.P'

Why then, "economic reform"? The usualanswer is that the economic growth that led topoverty reduction in the 1980s was unsus-tainable. Huge subsidies into and out of theagricultural system (cheap fertilizer, water andpower in - cheap food out via the public dis-tribution system) ensured that India's growthspurt in the 1980s would push the country intothe linked fiscal and balance of paymentscrises that erupted in 1991. Limited tax con-cessions to big business in the 1980s, combinedwith pervasive tax evasion, also forced bothCongress party and National Front (1980-91)governments to raise revenues by deficitfinancing and by borrowing more at home andabroad. Worse, the underlying structures of theIndian economy remained as sclerotic andirrational as ever. India had some of the highestrates of effective protection anywhere in theworld. These barriers encouraged Indianbusiness to provide goods and services that wereincreasingly unwelcome at home and that noone else in the world would buy. Early propo-nents of reform wondered aloud why Indiansat home were condemned to poor service andpoor jobs at the hands of the permit-license-quota Raj while Indians abroad were acclaimedfor their hard work and innovation.

By circa 1990 it was clear that some ele-ments within India's business communities, ledby the Confederation ofIndian Industry (CH),as well as significant parts of the urban middleclass, were fed up with forms of economicmismanagement that discouraged innovationand which limited choice in the shops. Theyobjected to the pro-farming agendas of theNational Front government, and they resentedPrime Minister V P. Singh's attempts to reward

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his mainly rural, mainly "Backward Classes"support base by extending systems of reser-vation (for government and public sector jobsand places in educational institutions) upwardsfrom the Scheduled Castes and Tribes to thosedesignated as Other Backward Classes. By thistime, too, the battles won by the likes ofMargaret Thatcher in the UK and RonaldReagan in the US were changing the land-scapes of international economic thinking.Thedisintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 alsohad profound effects in India. These were feltfirst in terms of a loss of export markets andforeign assistance. Later on they helped pushIndia closer to the US and the World TradeOrganisation.e" In the early 1990s theeconomist John Williamson felt able todescribe a new Washington Consensus on"sensible" macroeconomic management.Development economics was already out offashion by then.r'" Deepak Lal had charged in1983 that it was precisely a first generation ofplanners and development economists whohad done the most damage in the "thirdworld."31 These were the "guilty men" whohad stalled economic progress in India by 20years or more.Washington, for its part, used thedebt crisis in Latin America to launch a broaderassault on dirigiste forms of economic manage-ment. Developing countries needed to returnto basics: to sound monetary and fiscal policiesand to open trade and capital accounts. Theelite revolt that led to Finance MinisterManmohan Singhs famous budget of 1991,and to the devaluation of the rupee that yearby 18-20 percent against leading currencies,was as much an echo of this thinking as it wasa practical response to the balance of paymentscrisis that so damaged India's reputation foreconomic competency.

By the early summer of 1991 India's fiscaldeficit stood at nearly nine percent of GDPand the country had sufficient foreign currencyreserves to finance only two weeks' worth ofimports. Moody's and Standard & Poor haddowngraded India's international credit rating.Finance Minister Manmohan Singh's budgetwas designed first and foremost to stabilize this

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situation. Cuts in defense spending and insubsidies for exports, sugar, and fertilizerswere meant to bring the fiscal deficit down to6.5 percent of GDP in the 1991-92 tax year. 32Thereafter, the government ofNarasimha Raomoved steadily-but not at any great pace-to"adjust" the deeper structures of the economy.Efforts were made to liberalize India's tradingregime, but even as late as 2000, despiteconsiderable progress, tariffs in India stillaveraged close to 30 percent and the ratio ofinternational trade to GDP remained under 25percent (low by global standards). Moreprogress was made with industrial policy. Thesystem of industrial licensing that had takenshape since the 1950s was "dismantled in allbut 18 designated industries (including drugsand pharmaceuticals, cars, and sugar), and for alllocations save for 23 cities with populationsabove one million people where licenses werestill required for new ventures or projectexpansion.P? Perhaps most significantly of all,"the reforms," as they soon became known,opened the door to greater foreign directinvestment in India's economy. Inward invest-ment by western multinationals became amajor part of the new "Shining India" that wastrumpeted by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led(BJP) National Democratic Alliance ahead ofthe Lok Sabha elections in 2004. McDonald'sin Delhi and Mumbai, along with IBM andInfosys in Bangalore, signaled India's connec-tions to the new landscapes of globalizationthat had gathered pace in the 1990s, andwhich were strongly registered in the tele-communications revolution that sweptthrough middle-class India.

No one now expects India to return to thedirigiste models that it pioneered more thanhalf a century ago. Significantly, Congress usedthe rise of the BJP in the 1980s, and thedestruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya inDecember 1992, as a foil for its economicagenda. Leftist parties were warned that strongopposition to that agenda would cause the Raogovernment to fall, and that this in turn wouldbring the Hindu nationalists to power in NewDelhi.34 As things worked out, the BJP did

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come to power in India in 1998 and ruled thecountry until 2004. By then, however, the BJPhad made its peace with globalization andreform. It gently retired its rhetoric of"swadeshi liberalization" and its support for"microchips but not potato chips." By 2000 itwas an enthusiastic advocate for a continuingprocess of economic liberalization that offeredclear advantages to some of its supporters inthe urban middle class.

Even the Communist Party of India(Marxist) (CPM) came to embrace liberaliza-tion. The CPM has continued to speak outagainst some aspects of the national reformagendas now being pressed by Prime MinisterManmohan Singh (from 2004).But in itsWestBengal heartland it has embraced that agendavigorously and with surprisingly little concernfor its traditional support bases in the country-side and among government workers. In 2007,the public face of economic reform in Indiawas focused for a while on Nandigram, a ruralarea in the Medinipur district ofWest Bengal.In March 2007, 14 people were killed inNandigram after the ruling Left Front govern-ment in Kolkata instructed CPM cadres andthe police to break resistance to their plans toexpropriate 10,000 acres of local farmingland. The land was earmarked for a SpecialEconomic Zone (SEZ) to be developed by theSalim group of Indonesia. The Left Frontgovernment argued that a linked group ofchemical works in N andigram would createup to 100,000 jobs in West Bengal. Theyfurther noted that they had to do battle witheight other states to host a joint venture withthe Salim group.

The killings at Nandigram have taken on asignificance that few in the Left Front govern-ment could have anticipated when contractswere signed. On the one hand, and mostimmediately, they advertised the willingness ofthe state in West Bengal to embrace whatMarxists call "accumulation by disposses-sion."35 In doing so, they dramatized theviolence of the accumulation process in otherparts of India -along the Narmada rivervalley, for example, where resistance to large

dams continues, or wherever poor people are"tidied out" of street environments marked forimprovement and upgrading (as they havebeen in many ofIndia's leading cities, includingthrough the grotesquely named "OperationSunshine" in Kolkata). 36 Development is nevereasy or painless, whatever the platitudes offeredto the contrary by politicians or real estatedevelopers.

On the other hand, N andig ram providesinsight into changing geographies of power inIndia. Nehru found to his cost in the 1950sthat he could not enforce land-to-the-tillerreforms in the countryside, where powerresided mainly with richer farmers. (Agri-cultural policy was handed to the states in theConstitution of India, adopted in 1950.)Nevertheless, the federal settlement that wasworked out between 1946 and 1949 placedIndia's states in a dependent relationship withthe Center.V President's Rule can be imposedon states under Article 356 of the constitution,and the inelasticity of major state revenuesoften forced them to seek extra funding fromNew Delhi in the form of grants-in-aid underArticle 275.

In the 1990s, in contrast, and more so in the2000s, many of India's states have been able toimprove their bargaining position against thecenter. Rob Jenkins has argued that the reformprocess has empowered states to behave as"competition states."38 Instead of competingwith one another to draw down funds fromNew Delhi, states like Maharashtra, Karnataka,Tamil Nadu, or West Bengal now fight withone another to host foreign direct investmentor the funds of non-resident Indians (NRIs). InJenkins' view, the real momentum of economicreform in India now lies in the states.A processof "provincial Darwinism" has taken hold, heargues, that compels states to compete withone another for the foreign funds that willreduce their fiscal deficits and dependence onNew Delhi. Forcible evictions of peasants andharsher labor laws are just two instrumentsdeployed by business-oriented state elites toattract capital to their states. In some cases,too-and Nandigram illustrates this very

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well-states are being encouraged to free upextensive parcels ofland as de facto fiefdoms ofprivate capital: this, in effect, is the remit andpurpose of the roughly 300 Special EconomicZones that were formed between 2005 and2007 under the act of that name.

Causes and consequences ofuneven growth

The privatization of space is a necessarycomplement to the way the ongoing process ofeconomic reform in India is being negotiated.To date, that process has been focused on thenon-agricultural economy, and in townsand cities.There are sound political reasons forthis, and it is widely agreed that successivegovernments in India since 1991 havemanaged the reform process with levels ofdetermination and skill that evaded policy-makers in the 1960s and 1970s. This in turn iscausing observers of India to rethink theirunderstandings of state-society relations. It isnot simply that power is being leached fromNew Delhi to state capitals, important thoughthis is. It is also becoming clear that a modern-izing elite in India, pushed on no doubt by bigbusiness and the international community, butably fronted by a band of far sighted techno-crats, first used the politics of crisis and nowuses the politics of success to create a climatefor ongoing reform that is nonetheless atodds with market fundamentalism or theWashington Consensus. This is the real andconsiderable achievement of the ClI and menlike Manmohan Singh, Montek SinghAhluwalia, and Palaniappan Chidambaram. Ifthe reform agenda in India can be criticizedfor its partiality and unevenness, even for itsslow speed, it can also be hailed as a successstory that has avoided the pitfalls of the bigbang approach to liberalization.i'" A lot ofprogress has been made by stealth, and this hasinvolved all manner of deals between differentmembers ofIndia's business and political elites.But the reform process in India has also beenadvanced by the careful building of coalitions,

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and by the bringing on side of politicians aswell as"rent-seeking" elites in the states, manyof whom had benefited from the permit-license-quota Raj and who might have beenexpected to slow down changes to it.Significantly, too, the ongoing process of eco-nomic reform in India has led to a sharpeningof the technical competency of some leadingdepartments of government. Arguably, thatcompetency was not there in the 1950s or1960s to support the Nehru-Mahalanobismodel of development.

The net effect of the reforms has been towiden the gulf between rich and poor peoplein India, and between rich and poor regions,but that was always going to be the case.Thestrongest arguments in the pro-reform lockerare these: (a) that rates of average per capitaincome growth in India have been rising since2003-04 beyond the 3.5-4.0 percent levelsrecorded in the 1980s and 1990s; and (b) thatsuch rates of growth would not have beenrecorded without economic reform. Putanother way, low levels of economic growthare no friend of the poor, neither are forms ofeconomic management based on populistpolitics and deficit financing. In the short run,this argument has it, economic growth mustpromote higher levels of income inequality-not that Indian levels are yet on a par withthose of Brazil or China. Richer people willpull ahead as the economy rewards talent andscarce skills, as for example in the IT sector.

Meanwhile, the gap between the westernand eastern states in India is opening IlP notbecause the latter are getting poorer, butbecause the former are getting richer. Again,we are seeing talent, or good economicpolicies, being rewarded. By the same token,poor people in Bihar are the victims of morethan two decades of economic mismanage-ment. Lalu Prasad Yadav built a politicalcoalition that rewarded Yadavs and Kurmiswith dignity (izzat), and Muslims with pro-tection, no mean feats both, but what he didnot promote was a politics of developmentaimed at tightening labor markets (thus raisingreal wages) or attracting inward investment.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT IN INDIA SINCE INDEPENDENCE

Per capita net state domestic product atconstant 1993-94 prices actually fell in Biharfrom Rs 4,474 in 1990-91 to Rs 3,396 in2003-04 (in part because of the loss ofJharkhand), while the residents of UttarPradesh, including the richer western parts ofthat state (but not Uttaranchal), saw their realincomes rise from Rs 5,342 in 1990-91 to ameager Rs 5,975 in 2003-04. In the westernstate of Maharashtra, meanwhile, the corres-ponding figures show more than a 60 percentincrease in real terms over 13 years, fromRs 10,159 and Rs 16,765. In Gujarat, the rateof economic expansion was even greater, witha per capita net state domestic product ofRs 8,788 nearly doubling in 2004-05 toRs 16,878.40

What is now evident in India, even more sothan previously, is the yawning gulf betweenthe country's haves and have-nots. For theformer, India is shining brightly. It is a land ofTata Nanos and shopping malls. It is a countrythat seems to be leapfrogging the industrialrevolution to land talented people directly inthose jobs-in IT, information processing, andfinance-that connect India to the globalizingworld outside. This is precisely the land ofSEZs, the Golden Quadrilateral, Gurgaon, theBandra Kurla complex in Mumbai, and varioustechnopoles in Bangalore, Chennai, andHyderabad. Henri Lefebvre reminds us thatcapitalism advances "by occupying space, byproducing [abstract] space," or by sweepingaway those legal, cultural or political forceswhich conspire to slow down the circulationtime of capital. 41 This is what we are beginningto see in India: the building of new urbanand regional geographies that trumpet thecountry's modernity. Boosters of reformargue, furthermore,that the benefits of higheraverage rates of growth must in time trickledown to the poor. After a decade (the 1990s)when the rate of poverty reduction in Indiaseemed to slow down, there are signs now thateconomic growth is again driving considerablereductions in the headcount incidence ofabsolute poverty. Even in Bihar, changes appearto be underway, with Chief Minister Nitish

Kumar advertising a business-friendly climateat some remove from the policies of his pre-decessor, Lalu Yadav. More tellingly, perhaps,the mushrooming growth of private, English-language schools in Bihar suggests an appetiteon the part of some parents there to see theiroffspringjoin the circuits of economic growthand enrichment that are on offer elsewhere inIndia.

But here too is the rub. The anti-growthpolicies that have held back large parts ofBiharand Uttar Pradesh have more to do with state-level politics than with deliberate neglect onthe part of New Delhi. If Rob Jenkins is right,pressures will grow even in these two states,particularly among the middle classes, for theirruling elites to embrace the reform agenda (asthe CPM is doing in West Bengal). But thereare also significant path dependencies at workhere, a point sometimes lost on those urgingBihar to be more like Maharashtra. AseemaSinha makes this point very well in her bookon the regional roots of development politicsin India.42 We need to recognize that India'srecent experiments with high-tech growthdepend in part on earlier (Nehruvian) roundsof investment in tertiary education (notably theinstitutes of technology and management) andother forms of colonial and postcolonial sup-port for private sector capitalist development inwestern India. In parts of eastern India, incontrast, slow growth may have been caused inlarge part by bad governance. But the gover-nance systems in place there also reflect thecontinuing legacies of the permanent settle-ment and the more recent consequences of aFreight Equalization Act that worked stronglyto the disadvantage of states in India's resourcetriangle by reducing the cost of coal, iron, andsteel in non-producing regions of India. TimBes1ey and his colleagues note that thepoverty-reducing effects of a given unit ofGDP per capita growth in India are much lessthan in East Asia, where the distribution oflanded wealth since circa 1950 has been muchmore even. Poverty elasticities in East Asia andthe Pacific are greater than -1 (that is, 1 percentgrowth produces more than a 1 percent

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reduction in poverty), whereas in South Asiathey are close to -0.6. But Besley and hiscollaborators also note that poverty elasticitiesin India vary from a high of -1.23 in Kerala toa low of -0.30 in Bihar.43 Even if economicgrowth does come to Bihar, their researchsuggests, the unevenness of land holdings,together with poor levels of existing infra-structure and primary education, will conspireto limit such poverty-reducing effects as Itmight and should have.

And here is a second difficulty. While itmay be true that New Delhi has not set out tohold back Bihar since circa 1980 or 1991, theparticular way in which India's urban andindustrial elites have pushed forward theagenda of economic reform has done fewfavors for the eastern part of the country. Tobegin with, there is the matter of theagricultural economy.What is needed in Bihar,still, is agrarian reform, but this is not on themainstream agenda. What we observe instead,as across India, is a crisis of profitability inagriculture. Young people are leaving thecountryside in droves, driven out by poor ratesof return on farming and pulled to the cities bythe prospect ofless onerous work. Close to 60percent ofIndians still find some employmentin agriculture and allied sectors, but the shareof the agricultural economy in India's GDP isnow below 20 percent. It will move downfurther over the coming decades.The country-side is also becoming the preserve of women,asmore young men earn the major part of theirlivelihoods in the urban economy. More sothan in the 1950s and 1960s, the cities ofIndiareally do represent the "modern" and there isevery reason to suppose that an increase ineducation supply in the countryside will pushyoung men (and some young women) evenfaster to those places where they can wearwestern clothes and hanker after office jobs.44

Whether decent jobs for high school orcollege graduates will be on offer is anothermatter. 45There are worries that India's reformtrajectory is bringing with it jobless growthand the urbanization of poverty. It is sometimesforgotten that the IT sector accounts for only

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2 percent of total services in India and only 1percent of GDP (although it contributesaround 5 percent of export earnings).46 Thatsaid, the manufacturing sector has beendoing better than many critics have recog-nized, and there has been enormous growth inemployment since circa 1990 in the householdindustry sector. What is clear looking ahead isthat the mass movement of people from ruralto urban India has only just begun.We will seemuch more of it over the next 20 or 30 years,as the agricultural sector continues to shrink asa supplier of employment and as a contributorto GDP. When the GOI does finally turn itsreforming spotlight on the countryside it willreduce the remaining subsidies that agricultureenjoys. It will also encourage the consolidationof larger farms, a process that is already underway in northwest India.

Finally, there is the matter of public goodsprovision, broadly defined. The most seriousimpediment to continued high rates ofeconomic growth in India is the undersupplyof infrastructure, from schools and hospitals toroads, railways and ports. The World Bankestimates that "India must invest around 3-4percent more of GDP on infrastructure tosustain growth of around 8 percent, addressexisting gaps and meet policy-driven coveragegoals.,,47This is a considerable sum of money tofind in a country that is still returning significantfiscal deficits at both central and state levels(albeit that considerable progress has been madesince circa 2004), and which still tolerates highlevels of tax evasion.t'' It is also not clear thereis the political will yet in India to financeimprovements in public sector health care andeducation provision. The preference is forpeople to pay for such goods in the privatesector, an elite-driven policy choice that ishugely damaging to poorer families.

Much less widely recognized outside India,although it has been referred to with someregularity by Prime Minister ManmohanSingh, is the worsening security situation inlarge swathes of eastern India, particularly inthe so-called tribal belt. The retreat of func-tioning local government in parts of more than

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THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT IN INDIA SINCE INDEPENDENCE

150 of India's 602 Districts has opened thedoor to a N axalite movement that does onoccasions seek to provide both security andbasic goods for disadvantaged local people. It isunlikely that the Indian state will lose controlof these territories in the same manner that thegovernment of Nepal lost almost all of the hillareas outside Kathmandu in the years from1996 to 2006. But any attempt to win backthese blocks and districts will take time, andmight be bloody. In the meantime, they are no-go areas for economic development. Privateinvestment will not flow to regions lackingclear property rights or an established rule oflaw. For better or worse, these red zones pro-mise to be a significant brake on the produc-tion of abstract space-that is, functioningspaces for capital and modernization-in largeparts ofBihar, Orissa,jharkhand, Chhattisgarh,and Andhra Pradesh, not to mention in someof the northeastern states.

Conclusion

--- The transformation of the Indian economysince 1980 has surprised most observers anddeserves a positive press. The Indian economywill be the third largest economy in the worldsometime in the mid-2030s (trailing only theUS and China). It is already in third place onceadjustments are made for purchasing powerparities (PPPs). Nominal average per capitaincomes in India were just over $1,050 in2007, rising to $4,550 in PPP terms: stillplacing India in the World Bank's band oflowincome countries, but edging it closer tomiddle income status. Moving forwards,Rodrik and Subramanian note that: "Over a40-year period, a 5.3 percent [per capita]growth rate would increase the income of theaverage person nearly eight-fold."? There arereasons to believe that India is now hitting atarget rate of growth of GDP 00 percent, andthat such growth rates can be continued at leastup to 2025 (if not to 2040 or 2045, by whichtime some decline in the rate of growth is tobe expected, as capital-output ratios increase).

The incidence of absolute poverty, measuredby income, should fall sharply in the wake ofhigh growth and will likely induce improve-ments in other measures of poverty anddeprivation, including in respect of sanitation,child health, and gender equality. These are allareas where India is behind its millenniumdevelopment goal (MDG) targets.

But nothing is guaranteed. India is still lessdependent on world market conditions thanmany other emergent developing countries,but that dependence is set to grow. India is notimmune to global crises, whether stock marketcrashes, rising energy prices or adverse climatechange. Internally, the GOI has major politicalissues to negotiate in future, not just withregard to forms of cultural nationalism, includ-ing a possible backlash against "westerniza-tion," but also in regard to gender issues (therole of women in the workforce, most notably)and the management of urban poverty or thecontainment of urban unrest. As things stand,all leading political parties in India support theagenda of economic reform.There is a growingsense that India's reform agenda is being drivenby a culture of success, rather than by thepolitics of fear or even necessity. The fruits ofthat initial success have gone overwhelminglyto India's elites and its urban middle classes,andupper castes, as was always bound to be thecase.The challenge now, however, is for Indiato move on from a reform agenda inspired byelites in revolt against the permit-license-quotaRaj. Opportunities need to be provided forpoor and excluded people to participate in thenew circuits of growth, not least if they are tobe deterred in some regions from the paths ofunrest, rebellion and/ or secession.

The political enfranchisement of India'spoorest groups might still be the country'slong-term salvation, much as N ehru onceimagined. It is equally possible, however, thatthe politics of exclusionary growth will bereinforced. As yet, rapid economic growth doesnot seem to be binding rich and poor Indianscloser together. The privatization of spacein India's cities surely hints at another futureas well: that of the Latin America city, with all

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its glitz, crime, segregation, and violence.Whichever way it goes, the future for eco-nomic development and social change in Indiais intimately bound up with its cities, andwith the politics of urban management. Ofthat we can be certain.

Notes

1 Dani Rodrik and Arvind Subramanian, "WhyIndia Can Grow at 7 Percent aYear or More:Projections and Reflections," IMF WorkingPaper, 04/118 (2004),p. 6.

2 Gurcharan Das, India Unbound: The Socialand Economic Revolution Jrom Independence to theGlobal InJormation Age (New York: Anchor,2002).

3 Kalpana Kochar et al., "India's Pattern ofDevelopment:What Happened,What Follows,"International Monetary Fund, Working PaperWP 106.02, www.imf.org/external/pubslft/wp/2006/wp0622.pdf (2006); see alsoAbhijitBanerjee, "The Paradox of Indian Growth: AComment on Kochar et al." (Mimeo: MIT,available at www.mit.edulfaculty/ download_pdf.php?id+1340,2006).

4 After writing a first draft of this essayI was ableto readArvind Panagariya'sspirited and upbeataccount of India: The Emerging Giant (Oxford:University Press,2008). Panagariya accepts thatIndia's growth rate stepped up in the 1980s (to4.8 percent per annum 1981-88), but furtherargues that the growth rate stepped up again-to 6.3 percent-from 1988. Given that the runof annual GDP growth rates from 1987-88 to1993-94 are 3.8 percent, 10.5 percent, 6.7percent, 5.6 percent, 1.3percent, 5.1 percent, and5.9 percent, I find the cutoff date of 1988 (or1988-89: the year of 10.5 percent growth)unconvincing, if not indeed rather arbitrary.

5 Work for the World Bank's 1990 WorldDevelopment Report proposed an inter-national poverty line of$l per dayat 1985 PPPs(purchasing power parities). At that time, Indiaused an officialpoverty line 0£$0.75 per day.In2008 the World Bank proposed a newinternational poverty line of$I.25 per day,using2005 data on PPPs. India's officialpoverty lines[or 2004-5 were Rs. 17.71 in urban areas andRs. 11.71 in rural areas,which translate to just

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£1.03 against 2005 PPPs. For discussion, seeChen and Ravallion 2008.

6 Simon Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth: Rate,Structure and Speed (New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 1966).

7 World Bank, India: Inclusive Growth and ServiceDelivery-Building on India's Success (Develop-ment Policy Review, Report No. 34580-IN)(Washington, DC: World Bank 2006), Figure1.12 and text.

8 Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss, ReinventingIndia: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism andPopular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press,2000).

9 Alan Heston, "National Income," in DharmaKumar and Meghnad Desai (eds), CambridgeEconomic History of India, vol. II (Cambridge:University Press,1982),pp.376-462.

10 Andre Beteille, Caste, Class and Power: ChangingPatterns cif Stratijicationin aTanjoreVillage (Berkeley,CA: University of California Press,1965).

11 Quoted in Sunil Khilnani, The Idea oJ India(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1997), p. 35.

12 See the chapter by Jan Breman in this volume.13 HansSinger,"TheDistribution of GainsBetween

Investing and Borrowing Countries," AmericanEconomicReview,40 (1950),pp.478-96; andRawPrebisch, The Economic Development oJ LatinAmerica and Its Principal Problems (Lake Success,NY:United Nations, 1950).

14 Dadabhai Naoroji anticipated this argument inhis Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London:Swan Sonnenschein, 1901).

15 Ronald Inden, "Embodying God: FromImperial Progresses to National Progress inIndia," Economy and Society, 24 (1995),pp. 245-78.

16 William Arthur Lewis, "Economic Develop-ment with Unlimited Supplies of Labour," TheManchester School, 22 (1954), pp. 139-91.

17 John Harriss, "Does the 'Depressor' still work?Agrarian Structure and Development in India:A Review of Evidence and Argument,"JournaloJPeasant Studies, 19 (1992), pp. 189-227.

18 Michael Lipton, Why Poor People Stay Poor:A Study oJ Urban Bias in World Development(London:Temple Smith, 1977). Charan Singh'sviews permeate much of his writings, but seeesp. India's Economic Policy: The GandhianBlueprint (New Delhi: Vikas, 1978), ch. v; andEconomic Nightmare oJ India: Its Cause and Cure(New Delhi: National 1981), chs vi-viii.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT IN INDIA SINCE INDEPENDENCE

19 V M. Dandekar and Nilkanth Rath, "Povertyin India: Dimensions and Trends," Economic andPolitical Weekly [EPVVJ,Vo!. 6, No. 1 (2 January,1971), pp. 25-48, 106-46.

20 Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph,In Pursuit of LakshmiiThe Political Economy of theIndian State (Chicago, IL:University of ChicagoPress, 1987).

21 Atul Kohli. Democracy and Discontent: India'sGrowing Crisis of Governability (Cambridge:University Press, 1990).

22 Partha Chatterjee, A Possible World: Essays inPolitical Criticism (New Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press 1977); also his The Politics of theGoverned: Rejlections on Popular Politics in Most ofthe World (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2004). Sudipta Kaviraj, "On the Crisis ofPolitical Institutions in India," Contributions toIndian Sociology, 18 (1984), pp. 223-43; also his"On State, Society and Discourse in India," inJames Manor (ed.), Rethinking Third World Politics(Harlow: Longman, 1991), pp. 72-89.

23 Kaviraj, "Crisis of Political Institutions," p. 227.24 Francine Frankel, India's Political Economy,

1947-1977: The Gradual Revolution (Princeton,NJ: University Press, 1978); Pranab Bardhan,The Political Economy of Development in India(Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); Jagdish Bhagwati,India in Transition: Freeing the Economy (Oxford:Clarendon, 1993).

25 Bhagwati, India; Thirukodikaval NilakantaSrinivasan, "Reform of Industrial and TradePolicies," EPW, Vol. 26, No. 37 (14 September,1991), pp. 2,143-45.

26 Atul Kohli, "Politics of Economic Growth inIndia, 1980-2005, Parts I and II," EPW, Vol.41,No. 13 (1 April, 2006), pp. 1,251-59 and 14 (8April, 2006), pp. 1,361-70.

27 Angus Deaton, and Jean Dreze, "Poverty andInequality in India:A Re-examination," EPW,Vol. 37, No. 36 (7 September, 2002),pp. 3,729-48.

28 Abhijit Sen and Himanshu, "Poverty andInequality in India-I," EPW, Vol 39, No. 38(18 September, 2004), pp.4,247-63 and "Povertyand Inequality in India-II," 39, pp. 4,361-75.

29 Kohli, "Politics of Economic Growth," p. 1,362.30 John Williamson, "Democracy and the

'Washington Consensus,'" World Development,21 (1993), pp. 1,329-36.

31 Deepak Lal, The Poverty of 'DevelopmentEconomics' (London: Institute of EconomicAffairs, 1993).

32 Drawing on Corbridge and Harriss, ReinventingIndia, p. 152.

33 Corbridge and Harriss, Reinventing India, p. 153.34 See Ashutosh Varshney, "Mass Politics or

Elite Politics? India's Economic Reforms inComparative Perspective," in Jeffrey Sachs et al.(eds), India 111 the Era of Economic Riforms(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999),pp. 222-60.

35 David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 2003).

36 On Narmada, seeAmita Baviskar, In the Belly ofthe River: Tribal Conflicts Over Development in theNarmada Valley (New Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress, 1995). On Operation Sunshine, seeChatterj ee, Politics of the Governed, p. 61.

37 See Paul R. Brass, The Politics of India SinceIndependence, 1st edn (Cambridge: UniversityPress, 1990).

38 Robert Jenkins. "The Developmental Impli-cations of Federal Political Institutions in India,"in Mark Robinson and Gordon White (eds),The Democratic Developmental State (Oxford:University Press, 1998), pp. 187-214. See alsoLawrence Saez, Federalism Without a Centre:TheImpact of Political and Economic Riforms on India ~Federal System (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,2002).

39 See Bradford De Long, "India since Inde-pendence:An Analytical Growth Narrative," inDani Rodrik (ed.), In Search ofProsperity:AnalyticNarratives on Economic Growth (Princeton, NJ:University Press, 2003), pp. 184-204. See alsoRob Jenkins, Democratic Politics and EconomicRiform in India (Cambridge: University Press,1999).

40 Government of India, Economic Survey, 2006-7(New Delhi: GOI, Ministry of Finance, 2007),Table 10.4.

41 Henri Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism (NewYork: St. Martin's Press, 1976), cited in DavidHarvey, Spaces of Capital (Edinburgh: UniversityPress, 2001), p. 376.

42 Aseema Sinha, The Regional Roots of DevelopmentPoliticsin India:A Divided Leviathan (Bloomington,IN: Indiana University Press,2005).

43 Tim Besley et al., Operationalising Pro-PoorGrowth: A Country Case Study on India (Mimeo:Working Paper of Department of Economics,London School of Economics, www.lse.ac.uk/collections/LSEIndia/pdf/propoorgrowth.pdf,2004), p. 13.

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44 An important word of caution here. Thefeminization of the countryside in states likeHaryana and Punjab is taking place in a contextwhere child sex ratios indicate there are nowfewer than 850 girls for every 1,000 boys aged0-6.Amartya Sen has argued that there are morethan 100 million missing from the world today.Perhaps as many as 30 million of these womenare missing from India; Amartya Kumar Sen,"More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing,"New York Review cif Books, 20 December, 1990.

45 See CraigJeffrey et al., Degrees Without Freedom?Education, Masculinities and Unemployment in

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North India (Stanford, CA: University Press,2008).

46 Jim Gordon and Poonam Gupta, "UnderstandingIndia's Services Revolution," paper preparedfor IMF-NCAER Conference, New Delhi,November 2003 www.imf.org/externallnp/apdl seminars12003 Inewdelhil gordon. pdf.

47 World Bank, India, p.1S.48 See Barbara Harriss-White, India Working: Essays

on Society and Economy (Cambridge: UniversityPress, 2003).

49 Rodrik and Subramanian, Why India Can Grow,p.6.

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