A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey

by Devesh Kapur, Arvind Subramanian

English 788 pages 1 edition

India’s journey has been distinctively ‘precocious’ in comparative terms. It opted for democracy before development and social change, promoted high-skilled services before and over low-skilled manufacturing, and chose a globalization that favoured the export of talented people and short-changed the poor. The socialist state became an inefficiently capitalist one before providing the public goods of physical infrastructure and human capital. The outcome has been surprising, with the country achieving success in creating and sustaining democracy, albeit flawed, and maintaining a modicum of order. As the world gets radically upended, India’s development odyssey is at a critical juncture. A Sixth of Humanity is an attempt to trace how one of the largest and most diverse countries in the world uniquely and daringly attempted four concurrent transformations-building a state, creating an economy, changing society and forging a sense of nationhood-under conditions of universal suffrage. Jointly written by political scientist Devesh Kapur and economist Arvind Subramanian, both of whom have decades of academic and policy experience, this book encompasses perspectives that span disciplines, experiences and geographies. Rigorously researched, carefully argued and lucidly written, this is the definitive development history of India. There is no book remotely like it.