Reimagining how the Indian state works

livemint.com:

₹7.5 trillion on education every year. There are frequent calls to double this number if the education system is to be fixed. Overcoming the myriad problems in areas such as education, health, nutrition, safety, justice and social protection needs more than higher public spending.

It requires a re-imagination of how the Indian state works. This is a compelling argument, and the central one in Accelerating India’s Development: A State-Led Roadmap for Effective Governance by Karthik Muralidharan, a professor of economics at the University of California San Diego. Public systems fail to translate even the best designed policies into effective implementation.

Besides authoring a string of influential academic papers, Muralidharan has also worked closely with several state governments to understand how their programmes work on the ground, and what can be done to make them more effective. He has been part of what is called “the credibility revolution" in development economics, or more specifically the use of tools such as randomised control trials to better understand how specific government policies impact outcomes on the ground to establish causality rather than mere correlation. Muralidharan argues that increasing public spending without improving the efficiency of the Indian state is akin to spending more money on fuel for an antiquated car that needs to be replaced.

His twin roles as an academic scholar and a policy advisor ensures that the book offers not just analysis but also specific reform suggestions over a wide range of public policy fronts. The result is a masterclass in development economics. Its multiple insights are accessible to a broader audience because it is not written clannishly for a select few.