Faculty Researcher Lant Pritchett, Professor of the Practice of International Development, Harvard Kennedy School Paper Title Is India a Flailing State? Detours on the Four Lane Highway to ModernizationIndia is a paradoxical country, according to Lant Pritchett, an economist who worked there from 2004 to 2007 as an economist for the World Bank. On the one hand, there is the booming economy, which has — with some brief interruptions — grown at a rapid clip since the 1980s. The men and women who fill the top tiers of government, moreover, are endowed with “incredibly spectacular intelligence, cleverness, and competence,” he says. These civil servants can deftly formulate “excellent policies and programs in nearly every domain,” maneuvering through the mountains of paperwork with stunning adroitness.
However, at the local levels of government, where these brilliant policies are supposed to be implemented, one finds a totally different story. “In police, tax collection, education, health, power, water supply — in nearly every routine service — there is rampant absenteeism, indifference, incompetence, and corruption,” Pritchett writes. And the problems are even more acute when it comes to providing more sophisticated services, such as networked irrigation or groundwater management. It’s almost as if the great brains of the Indian system are disconnected from its limbs.
To illustrate these problems, Pritchett discussed the spotty attendance patterns of government-employed healthcare workers in the state of Rajasthan. A recent analysis found that only half the staff paid to run the state’s medical facilities actually came to work when they were supposed to, forcing large numbers of patients to seek treatment elsewhere. Attendance improved temporarily when workers were told their pay would be docked for skipping workdays without permission. However, when no additional measures were imposed, attendance eventually dropped back to where it had been — or even lower. “When one-half to two-thirds of workers do not show up — that reflects not the management of a particular agency, but rather a more severe system crisis,” writes Pritchett, who cites evidence showing this example “is not atypical of attendance rates around India.”
A study of how driver’s licenses are granted in Delhi found that only 12 percent of the people who paid an “agent” to secure a license were required to demonstrate their competence by taking a driver’s exam. Not only does this system “allow unqualified drivers onto the roads,” Pritchett says, it also underscores the extent to which corruption in India is “fully institutionalized.”
With no shortage of examples like this, Pritchett felt compelled to invent a whole new category, which he calls a “flailing state,” to describe this land of contradictions. As he sees it, a nation needs to advance on four separate fronts — economic, political, administrative, and social — to make the “modernization” leap from developing to developed status.
“It’s easy to recognize a success like Denmark, which has completed the transition in all of these areas, just as it’s easy to recognize a failure like Somalia, which has succeeded in none,” he notes. “What’s been lacking are good diagnostic classifications for the countries in between. You can have failed services in a place like India that is not a failing state.”
India is not failing economically and has maintained a thriving electoral democracy — with an active parliament, respect for human rights, an independent judiciary, and a free press — almost continuously since gaining its independence in 1947. “But it is equally clear that India is not an entirely successful state either,” Pritchett says. When it comes to providing basic services to its citizenry, the nation is largely dysfunctional.
These administrative failings cannot be blamed solely on lax or crooked politicians who are entrenched in power, Pritchett explains, since “in India, unlike in the United States, there is a massive anti-incumbency bias in elections.” Instead, he attributes much of the problem to social divisions rooted in India’s caste system. In a 2007 survey, for example, 91 percent of the Dalit caste members (formerly called “untouchables”) in one district of Uttar Pradesh reported that non-Dalit midwives employed by the government would never come to their homes, even though they were bound to do so by their jobs. Similarly, when politicians are elected to office, they typically promise to give jobs to people from their own caste, with little regard as to whether that will make schools, hospitals, or other facilities better. Upon being asked when new roads would be built, one politician famously told his fellow caste members that by virtue of his election he’d given them their “dignity,” which was more important than roads.
Eradicating corruption in India, where it is not only embedded but “capitalized,” will be extremely difficult, Pritchett acknowledges. With jobs routinely purchased, many people view reforms as attempts to take away assets they’ve already paid for. Progress on this front will necessarily be slow and incremental — a “hard slog” that could take decades. Nevertheless, Pritchett is optimistic about India’s long-term prospects because, “with its robust democracy, you have all the mechanisms in place for that slog to be effective.” — Steve Nadis
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