India’s 75-year journey of development has intertwined nation-building, democracy, and economic transformation in ways that challenge conventional theories of growth – highlighting both the achievements and enduring tensions between inclusion, governance, and inequality that continue to shape the country's future.
Editor's note: This episode of VoxDevTalks is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian discuss their recent book A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey. The conversation explores how India’s economic, political, and social transformation since its independence defies conventional models of development – from democracy’s double-edged role to the balance between state power and market freedom.
The book examines 75 years of development and the ways in which India has defied many of our ideas of how development should occur. The result is not a simple narrative of progress but a nuanced story that intertwines nation-building, economic reform, and social change.
Building a nation and an economy at once
Kapur and Subramanian describe their project as “both argument and history”. As Kapur explains, nation- and state-building cannot be separated, “they run concurrently”.
When India became independent in 1947, it faced the extraordinary challenge of building both a political state and a sense of national unity within an exceptionally diverse society.
“We wanted to write this story looking at how the choices that the political leadership faced in building a state and a nation shaped economic development, but also how economic development, in turn, shaped nation building”. Kapur
Subramanian adds that India’s social complexity – from caste and patriarchy to regional variation – made this task uniquely difficult. What made it even more remarkable was that “from day one, India had universal franchise-based democratic politics, which made the Indian experience quite distinctive and unique”.
A slow start, then a surge
The authors reject the popular idea that India’s post-independence story was an uninterrupted “growth miracle”.
For the first three decades, growth was sluggish, poverty remained high, and education advanced slowly. Structural transformation – moving from agriculture to industry – barely occurred.
“Between 1950 and 1980, China was kind of a mess politically... and yet during that period it raced ahead of India”. Subramanian
Only from the mid-1980s onwards did India’s economy begin its sustained expansion, lasting more than three decades and lifting hundreds of millions from poverty. Yet both authors insist that the Indian story cannot be measured by GDP alone. Its achievements – sustaining democracy and relative order in such a vast, diverse, and poor country – were “remarkable political achievements” in their own right.
Democracy: India’s greatest strength and its biggest constraint
Kapur calls democracy India’s “key instrument of nation building”. In contrast to the European model of nationhood built on language or religion, India’s founders “charted a new way of thinking about nationhood” where inclusion and participation were central.
“The inclusiveness was as much intrinsic as instrumental”. Kapur
But democracy also came with economic trade-offs. Democracy, Subramanian argues, both “gives and takes”. Because India’s democratic leaders could not use coercive means, transformative land reform never materialised. Welfare policies often took precedence over public goods like education and health.
“The Indian fiscal state has been quite weak”, Subramanian observes, with average deficits of around 11–12% of GDP. The pressures of constant elections also bred corruption and expensive campaign financing.
The burden and promise of state planning
Like many nations in the 1950s and 1960s, India embraced central planning. But its model went further.
“There were one or two really distinctive things that India did which other developing countries did not do. The most damaging one was what India did to its own private sector”. Subramanian
The state both restricted foreign competition and imposed limits on the domestic private sector. The resulting ‘Licence Raj’ stifled entrepreneurship and created new avenues for corruption.
Kapur adds that a persistent 'statist orientation' – shared across the left and right – also failed to deliver in basic education and healthcare. He points out the paradox that even states ruled by leftist parties neglected these essential services.
India’s states: Laboratories of progress and failure
A major theme of the book is the role of India’s state governments.
“Many of the important sectors of the economy, like health, education, agriculture, law and order, power, electricity, are all constitutionally within the mandate of state governments”. Subramanian
While the central government dominates headlines, it is the states that often determine everyday development outcomes.
“Whatever the centre did badly, the states did worse”. Subramanian
Accountability and corruption problems have been especially severe at state level. Still, after the 1990s reforms, some regions began to thrive. “Peninsular India grew at Chinese rates of growth”, showing that states “have the power to do bad… but also the agency to do good”.
Kapur underscores the scale of this federal complexity. Managing development at such scale, he argues, presents “a distinctive set of questions and challenges” that scholars still struggle to explain.
Growth, inequality and social change in modern India
From the 1980s onwards, India’s embrace of market reforms and openness brought transformative growth.
“It’s the neoliberal state in India that not only delivered growth but actually provided public infrastructure, created a social safety net. All the educational, gender outcomes actually all improved after growth”. Subramanian
Economic liberalisation gave millions new opportunities and resources, even as inequality widened. Kapur highlights the “sharp decline in poverty” as one of India’s most striking achievements.
“The sorts of destitution that marked the worst of Indian poverty… have surely gone”. Kapur
Yet, he warns, inequality – between households and between states – “has increased sharply”.
Economic modernisation has also eroded rigid links between caste and occupation. “Growth... was like a grease that dissolved some of these things”, Subramanian says, though inter-caste marriage remains rare. “That is still a huge block in broader societal transformation”, adds Kapur.
India’s future: Balancing openness and order
The discussion concludes with reflections on India’s internal and external future. Kapur voices concern that India may be drifting from its secular and multicultural roots.
“The current political dispensation... is ironically choosing a nation-building model that is very European – single religion, single language... If not done very carefully, it can create the very schisms that have been avoided and have been one of India's big achievements”. Kapur
Subramanian also warns that weakening federalism or democratic institutions would endanger more than the economy.
Externally, India is navigating what Kapur calls “a weak hand” amid tensions with China and an unpredictable United States.
Subramanian concludes that India must pursue “a much more nuanced way” of engaging globally.
“You have to be open, you have to have domestic capability, and you have to engage with the world in a way that minimises over-dependencies”. Subramanian
A broader lesson for development
A Sixth of Humanity ultimately uses India’s experience to illuminate the wider dilemmas of development – how to grow, modernise, and unify at once. Ultimately, the book is presented as offering valuable lessons beyond India itself – a reflection on the wider forces shaping the world currently.
By weaving together economics, politics, and history, Kapur and Subramanian reveal a nation still in motion – a democracy that gives and takes, a state that both empowers and constrains, and a society that, even after three-quarters of a century, continues to redefine what development means.