Why India is so Bad at Core Services

Karthik Muralidharan wrote this long (900+ pages) but excellent book, Accelerating India’s Development, on how to improve India’s governance. He starts by asking the question everyone laments, “Why is the Indian state (government) so ineffective at delivering core services?”

 

The answer is far more complex than the usual suspects. The first generation of independent India’s leaders had suffered in jail and under British rule:

“(This gave them the) motivation and public trust to focus on nation-building investments because electoral success was virtually guaranteed.”

As time passed, electoral success was no longer guaranteed. Inevitably then, electoral incentives changed the focus of politicians to “providing visible benefits”. Long-term good, sadly, does not fall in that category. Building new schools is visible and immediate; providing quality education is neither.

 

In addition, we became a democracy with universal adult franchise right at inception. No Western democracy started that way – not Britain, not France, not America… Every country expanded democracy only after they got a bit richer. What has that got to do with the poor quality of services provided by the government? Once you give everyone the right to vote, they start demanding better services and amenities. But a poor country doesn’t have the money to provide things yet. But electoral compulsions force the government to try and deliver too much, without the money or capability to deliver. Thus, instead of doing a few things only (but doing them well), the government tries to do everything and fails at most. This is why Indian governments do well in “mission mode” – do one precise thing over a fixed timeframe (holding an election, polio/COVID vaccinations, Kumbh mela) but is terrible in “regular mode”. Democracy, unfortunately, has imposed a “premature load-bearing” cost.

 

Data shows that the quality of services improves when the elites use it. But since the state is over-committed (for reasons explained above), and thus does badly at most things, the elite have exited the system. They have private vehicles, private schools, private water supply… you get the idea.

 

Deep rooted caste and religious divides in society aggravate the problem. How? Muralidharan says that states that do better on broad-based service delivery are also the ones that had social movements to reform society (e.g. Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Maharashtra). The ones that do worst are the ones still most entrenched in caste and/or religion based splits (e.g. UP, Bihar). At every level, the entrenched caste and economic elites do (and have done) everything to thwart universal service rollouts. This has been true from the time of independence. Nehru and Ambedkar anticipated this, and it was one of the reasons why they ensured the constitution was written with more power to the Center – they truly believed a paternalistic Center was the only way to reform society. Now we see the problem with that approach – states have lesser power and money-share, even though they are best positioned to design and customize solutions based on the specifics of that state.

 

Another societal flaw is severe gender bias and discrimination. Women usually benefit the most from good public services (water, electricity), so they favour such services. But if women have lesser power and freedom, well, their view doesn’t get reflected in elections and so the political incentive to focus on such aspects is proportionally low.

 

All this is just from the first chapter of the book! I totally get why this book is so highly quoted and recommended, even though it is 900+ pages long.