Muralidharan is an academic who went to grad school in the US and is a faculty at UCSD but also has done a ton of field work in India, working with various state governments, NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) and academic institutions. Since this book titled Accelerating India's Development - A State Led Roadmap for Effective Governance, distills everything he had learned and gathered over the last two decades, it is panoramic, comprehensive and impressively detailed. Though it spans 800 pages, the last 200 pages are notes & references, leaving a good 600 pages for us to read, in very accessible language.
Initial chapters set out the current status and the problems that need to be solved. When India got its independence from the British 77 years ago, many thought it may break apart into dozen different pieces due to its diversity in people, culture, languages, religion, wealth and geography. While the union has endured, thriving as the world's largest democracy, there are still humungous problems in service delivery, lack of trust in the government & politicians, corruption, poverty and so forth that need to be solved. General apathy or disillusionment among the citizenry is quite common making such problem solving quite difficult.
After setting up that background, with a lot of facts, data and charts, Muralidharan goes around breaking several myths and presents current problems & status from different perspectives. Couple of examples:
- Western scholars or even people in India tend to compare current conditions in India with developed countries as they exist today to complain how bad the situation in India is. Author points out that countries like the US initially became democracies where only a very small minority (i.e. white men) had the ability to vote, and the state was able to provide the guarantees and services that small voting block desired (e.g. land rights). With that initial trust built, more citizens could be enfranchised slowly (e.g. women, blacks), over the decades, if not centuries. With raising tax revenue in the same period, additional services like education, health, etc. could be provided by the government. This ladder of starting small, delivering a small set of services, gaining the trust and slowly expanding the tax base, capacity and services worked in the histories of developed countries. But in case of India, right off the bat, everyone in the country was enfranchised from the beginning as the constitution was written when India got its freedom in 1947. But the state had no tax revenue or other needed capacity to deliver so many things like food, jobs, education, healthcare, defense. etc. the citizenry expected from the government! This led to distrust, resulting in people cheating on taxes, moving to private services for their education, healthcare needs, preventing the state from ever acquiring the capacity or ability or trust to deliver all the expected services. When we look at India's evolution in this light, we may not bad mouth the country so much.
- Indian citizenry often feels that most of the government funds are swindled by corrupt politicians and bureaucrats. The author argues that a pie chart of funds not reaching the intended goals, shows only 13% swallowed by corruption, while the remaining 87% loss is due to poor and ineffective/inefficient implementation. If we can tweak the system to eliminate inefficiencies even a little, it may have 10X improvements in deliveries! As the deliveries and services improve, corruption may start to go down on its own. Thus, there is a lot of hope for fixing the system.
- There is a general perception that there are way too many Indian government employees. But in reality, there are only 16 public employees for every 1000 citizens in India, while the number is 57, 77, 138 and 159 respectively in China, US, Sweden and Norway! This shows that the number of public servants per capita are one of the least in the world for India! Even the limited state capacity (e.g. police) is used to provide services for the rich and powerful (e.g. VIP escort) rather than ensuring the safety of ordinary citizens.
After several chapters of such interesting juxtaposing of facts, book gets into ideas for improving the system area by area. Since the suggestions are not just armchair analysis but are tested in field, author is keenly aware of what is practical. He focuses on changes that can be implemented by politicians with their eyes on the next election that they need to win. Hence many suggestions are ones that are especially low hanging fruits that can be picked with minimum effort and expense. While many of the suggestions are worth discussing, to keep the review short, we can summarize them as follows:
- Everywhere focus in India to improve services is on allotting more resources but not on measuring outcomes. Thus, when it comes to education, a school may get 10 computers. But since the school principal will be in deep trouble during audit if a computer is found missing, he will tend to keep it under lock and key ensuring its safety, though this may result in a situation where students don't learn much from it. Every ministry/secretory/NGO continues to ask for more funding for their pet area. But simply improving efficiency by ceding a lot of control to local entities may solve a lot of these limited resource issues. Book cites China and Vietnam as two countries that have improved quality of education delivery without increasing the teachers' salary. Particularly China that is often seen as a very strong centrally controlled country, is cited many times for the level of decision making, budgeting, spending that is taking place at the local government level.
- In a field trial, the author worked with an Indian state government to setup a calling center with minimal expense. They then used it to contact end recipients of a government grant to check if they got the disbursed money. While doing this, they advertised this process of checking widely to the bureaucrats that are the intermediary, delivering the funds to the state's citizens. This apparently eliminated most of the swindling and the money reached the intended recipients properly. Thus, implementing some such small but highly visible check may make a dramatic difference in the quality of service delivered.
- Since firing ineffective government workers may not be easy, author suggests hiring new interns to assist existing employees on a contract basis for 3 to 5 years. Government employees won't object to this since they are getting extra help. The temporary employees will work better since the carrot of a small percentage of them becoming permanent later could be dangled in front of them. Many who don't become permanent can apply for another temporary term or would have at least gathered valuable skills they can use elsewhere to get gainful employment. Over the years, quality of service should improve considerably with older inefficient employees retiring.
There are many more such field-tested ideas for healthcare, court system (that is creaking under the backlogged case load), agriculture, policing, and so on that are all worth exploring. Author argues that many of these ideas can be implemented with results starting to show up within about four years. Since Indian elections are held once in five years, politicians can wade into these ideas with the hope of being able to take credit for the positive results during the following election cycle. Book focuses more on what can be done at the state level, rather than at the central/federal govt level, since the needs of the Indian states vary widely. This approach will allow more customized solutions that could be tried out quickly at a smaller scale at the state level. If they are successful, other states can adopt them. If not, they can tweak the programs and iterate to perfect them. He cites the example of Illam Thedi Kalvi (Education at your door step), a program pioneered by the state of Tamilnadu during the Covid pandemic to ensure children got access to enough schooling at their home, that turned out to be a great success. This approach makes each one of the 28 Indian states smaller labs that can move more nimbly.
In more than one section, including the last chapter, author talks about the Aadhar biometric ID system India has implemented, as a poster child for excellent solution development that is customized for India and deployed in such massive scale for the first time in the world. Such initiatives manage to prove naysayers within India, who think India can't innovate at that scale, wrong. The Unified Payment Interface (UPI) is the next innovation that has leap frogged many other developed nations' systems in being developed, deployed and being operated smoothly on a massive scale. Both of these solutions are now being exported to other countries. This is used to illustrate the point that due to its size and scale, solutions being put together for India can potentially help the world as well. Thus, book concludes that though it may appear daunting, there is a lot that could be done to smoothly to accelerate India's development.
There is not much to say that is negative about the book. Language is simple, areas covered are comprehensive, ideas are presented for central, state, local governments to try out, bureaucrats and individual citizens to take up, and corporations and NGOs to contribute. While one can complain about the length of the book (800 pages), the scope seems to warrant it. Even if you are not interested in India particularly, if you are a policy geek like me, it might be an interesting read. I am also sure many ideas presented will be applicable to several other countries in the world. If you don't have the time and patience to read the book, you can atleast consider listening to the podcast episode where many of these ideas were first discussed.
