Let’s not blame India’s early policy settings for our failings in mass education
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Three-quarters of a century after freedom from British rule, Nehruvian policies continue to animate debates on the extent to which they aided or hobbled the emergence of India’s economy. Even before we made a decisive shift in 1991 to reduce the state’s role, a leftist critique sought to skewer the policy choices of our formative years for investing in elite education at the cost of mass learning.
The economy’s rise and passage of time have not eased that criticism. A recent study by Nitin Kumar Bharti and Li Yang of the Paris School of Economics’ World Inequality Lab compares the approach taken by India and China to public education over a dozen decades—from 1900 to 2020–to examine its economic impact. That it makes a difference over the long-term wasn’t in doubt.
That it might explain divergent growth paths between the two economies is what the work of Bharti and Yang would have us think. With China’s per capita income almost five times India’s today, it is easy to forget that half a century ago, the two were more or less at par as economies struggling to emerge from poverty. Beijing had a head-start over New Delhi in easing economic controls and letting private profit act as an incentive for value generation.
Also, it was a rural rebellion against collective farming that led China’s market reforms, while it was a lack of dollars to pay for oil imports that triggered ours by exposing a gaping hole in our statist model of autarky. The remedies differed accordingly. However, the Bharti-Yang study suggests that the most consequential top-down versus bottom-up difference lay in public education, not market orientation.
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