The crisis of Indian democracy
The crisis of Indian democracy: While India’s economy has received periodic attention, mostly during critical moments defined by food shortages and foreign exchange outages, the workings of its democracy have received next to none...
July
27, 2016
Democracy
and reforms
Perhaps by coincidence,
two scholarly articles, one by Pulapre Balakrishnan on “The crisis of Indian
democracy” and another by C Rangarajan on reforms appeared in The Hindu on the
same day (July 27). Both raise some basic issues which have a bearing on
governance and economic growth.
The top-down approach to
democratic processes worked well during the first two decades of Indian
republic. From 1970’s, political leadership started showing signs of
disintegration and the federal system slowly started becoming a stumbling block
in taking forward even the well-intentioned developmental measures. We refused
to pay enough attention to literacy and did not give adequate attention to
removal of poverty. This approach resulted in people not participating in
democratic processes.
The 1991 crisis thrust
upon the country the responsibility of implementing LPG
(Liberalisation-Privatisation-Globalisation) reforms which were not tailor-made
for experimenting in the Indian context. The cut and paste approach to reforms
in all sectors including finance, industry, information technology and pension
resulted in avoidable frictions and inefficient implementation of otherwise
excellent projects and programmes.
The two articles, one by
a professor of repute and another by one who has been guiding financial sector
leadership and GOI for decades, can form the basis for a healthy debate on
changes in outlook needed to transform India in the direction Prime Minister
Narendra Modi has promised to take the country’s profile.
M
G Warrier, Mumbai
Comments