Governance reform: Karthik Muralidharan’s treatise is refreshingly new

livemint.com:

Since so much of my work lies at the intersection of law and technology, I’m always interested in theories of governance. If I can understand how governance works, I believe I will be better informed as to how technology can be used to make it more effective. Which is why, ever since I heard that it was being written, I’ve been waiting to read Karthik Muralidharan’s tome, Accelerating India’s Development.

This, in many ways, is a remarkable book, not just because of its size (at 800 pages, it could easily do duty as a doorstop), but because of how it has been written. It’s neatly organized into bite-sized essays that are easy to digest, with each chapter building on those before it to collectively contribute to the grand argument. Most importantly, unlike so many books of its ilk, instead of just focusing on what is wrong with the Indian state, it offers implementable suggestions as to how to make it better.

The starting premise of the book is that the last time we made any “systematic investments into the institutional foundations of the Indian state" was in 1950. Since then, all we have done is increase our expectations of what the state must provide us without making necessary investments in its capacity to deliver. One of the reasons for this, Karthik argues, is that Indian citizens had universal adult franchise right from the country’s birth, unlike those of other nations.

Where other countries pursued development at the cost of initially disenfranchised interest groups (women, minorities and the like), Indian politicians had to appease everyone and as a result could take no short-cuts. This is why as powerful as universal adult franchise has been for democracy, it has affected the pace of our development. He points