Why India Cannot Rise With Weak State Capacity

India faces a host of development challenges: education and health, manufacturing and jobs, urbanization and pollution. In the world’s most populous country, sheer scale makes addressing each of these daunting, and their convergence even more so. Climate change and artificial intelligence add more uncertainty, making many of these problems more acute in the next two decades. Yet none can be adequately addressed unless the principal actor shaping India’s development—the Indian state—becomes more competent. The meta development challenge for India will face over the next few decades is the quality, competence and integrity of the state, without which progress elsewhere will remain elusive. Despite its multiple political and social divisions, India’s default ideology is statist: the governing Bharatiya Janata Party on the right, the communists on the left, and nearly everyone in between share a belief that the state should have a central role in controlling the economy and directing social change. Why, then, is there so little effort devoted to improving how the state functions, even as challenges mount?The trouble with an ineffectual stateIn India’s vast federal system, responsibilit...