Accelerating Development review: State-led growth is key

However, the author is not writing a textbook. The first half of chapters is just the motivation for the second half that outlines many evidence-based ideas for implementation — on how states can accelerate development.

Reading the book, one is frequently reminded of the author’s quote from Rukmini Banerji — asliyat se lagao — and the analogous Chinese proverb popularised by Deng Xiaoping — seeking truth from facts. Muralidharan consistently advocates for systems that generate validated data and argues for processes that draw upon data, even suggesting linking compensation to outcomes measured by district surveys.

Another feature of this book is that ideas are directed at state governments, not the Union government, except to suggest more freedom for states that are delivering good outcomes, e.g., by providing more flexibility in central schemes or accessing data from states through APIs, rather than mandating multiple apps, which gobble frontline time. The focus on states creates multiple sites for ideas to be adopted; a revenue-raising idea here, a health-improving idea there, and so on. Muralidharan is not expecting that the adoption will be top-down, with states in lock-step. Instead, the reliance is on a process of (hopefully rapid) diffusion, in a manner that is in sync with the political culture of a state.

The third characteristic is a claim that “there is often no trade-off between equity and efficiency”, because few, if any, of our states operate on the frontier where such a trade-off is necessary. Instead, it’s argued that there are many actions that can improve both. However, the examples provided, e.g., replacing free electricity to farmers with “income transfers… up to a landholding cap” can face resistance from elites, and, as Muralidharan notes, there is “a pattern of elite bias in every sector discussed in this book”. The book is unclear as to how to overcome this bias. Without that we will get outcomes such as much smaller income transfers, along with free electricity. Other ideas, for example, offering a choice between direct benefit transfers (DBT) or grain from PDS, may be more implementable, though, if the DBT option catches on, could FCI procurement as a mechanism to back minimum support prices continue?

For the most part, Muralidharan’s reform ideas are not just substantive, but also radical. A running theme in the book is the practicum model, which perhaps builds on the author’s own research experience with the cost-effectiveness of additional temporary teachers in schools. Practicum involves mixing classroom instruction with concurrent training in a government department, with some preference in future recruitment to its graduates. This model is fleshed out in degrees of detail for administration, education, health, judiciary, and even the police.  Implementing it would, of course, entail a wholesale change in staffing and recruitment practices, adding to abovementioned changes in compensation policy.

At a recent event in Delhi, the author said: “Real power comes not from sharing solutions but distributing agency” — an insight that is hard to appreciate and harder to implement. Not all the reform ideas in the book may pass this test, but many do, though they remain hard to implement. Some green shoots are, however, visible. Tamil Nadu recently established a Human Resources Reforms Committee, which has since submitted its report. Andhra Pradesh has established an in-house data analysis unit serving multiple departments, and recruited over 1,00,000 contractual (recently regularised) frontline workers. It will be interesting to see if Telangana’s district level KPI surveys survives the change in political regime. All these are in alignment with some of the author’s reform ideas. Others, such as changing voting systems, are certainly not for the faint-hearted, but maybe one can visualise starting with local elections in one state, the drumbeat towards ‘one nation, one election’ notwithstanding.

Throughout the book, the author seems to hope that the reform path will be lit at many places by someone, somewhere, trying some idea, and that successful initiatives will be rapidly replicated. Time will tell if that will happen, but if the lucidity of analysis and provocativeness of the book’s ideas combine to inspire enough states to experiment, the author should consider the labour well-recompensed. Nonetheless, regardless of what happens, the book remains an engaging and thought-provoking read, deserving its place on the shelf.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi