The title of this book, Making India Great Again, has a story in itself. With the emphasis on the word ‘again’, we get back to history and look at how the country was great, and the idea is to extract principles from the past to project into the future. The overarching argument of the authors is that we have all the basic ingredients for greatness, but it needs to be organised in a particular pattern.
Meeta and Rajivlochan take a broad-brush history of pre-independence India, and look at issues of innovation and productivity. The look at the resources that the country is endowed with; genius that was embedded in both our scientific and commercial knowledge systems and argue that India lost out on all these because of the failure to build on these systems. Three aspects that were needed to build on these systems. One, fitting these systems with data to harness scientific knowledge for a competitive edge; two, documenting the knowledge base to make incremental innovations in science and technology as well as in commercial structures and not reinvent the wheel; three, evaluation of the initiatives that help in course correction and replication.
These need a system of law enforcement that protects intellectual property rights, enforcing contracts and aid free trade. The authors talk about cronyism not only in the Indian context but also in the case of colonisers who came with trading organisations with a charter framework that provided the power of the state to a business, blurring the difference between political and commercial power. The way forward to make India great again is to identify our traditional strengths and focus on productivity.
It is interesting that the authors focus so much on extant skills, resources and talk about productivity as a larger path to prosperity. Of course, they also talk about justice, rule of law and enforcements of contracts as a necessary requirement for reform, but it is underplayed in comparison to use of organised data in policy making, evaluation and documentation. Let us assume that we have a robust framework for both miraculously increasing productivity and ensuring an environment that helps speedy dispensation of justice. We also have a data collection, documentation and evaluation framework. Have we laid the foundation for a rich and great India?
This leads us to ask two fundamental questions: First, is an increase in productivity the same as increase in competitiveness? Would this lead us to occupying the global supply chains? For instance, if we double our agricultural production through efficient use of technological solutions would we be able to occupy the global markets? Second, does increase in productivity (they even allude to use of robotics in agriculture) and efficiency create a more equitable society, given the curse of demographics? When we introduce technology and machinery, we replace human labour. Unless we can find alternative means for deploying human labour through economic growth and competitiveness we would not be moving towards a just society, though dispensation of justice in a narrow sense of rule of law might apply.
We need to look at the stories emanating from China to understand this better. There is automation, there is extremely high levels of productivity, there is economic growth and prosperity, but we have never heard happy stories of workers in sweatshops or in agriculture.
Meeta is a civil servant who understands these issues from the ground up, and Rajivlochan is an academic who has the discipline to frame it in the theoretical construct. Both have brought out very interesting insights. This book is a work of passion with detailed research, digging into archival material. While the issues of demography and competitiveness was not intended in the frame of the book, I have still raised it. Not so much as a critique but more as a trigger to carry this conversation forward. I hope their future writings will add more pieces of the jigsaw to put a much clearer picture. It is complex, but possible.
