56. Ashwini Deshpande and Rajesh Ramachandran, “How Backward Are the Other Backward Classes? Changing Contours of Caste Disadvantage in India,” Delhi School of Economics, Centre for Development Economics Working Paper 233, November 2014. Another study found that there was almost no change in the rate of business ownership for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes relative to the rest of the population between 1990 and 2005. See Lakshmi Iyer, Tarun Khanna, and Ashutosh Varshney, “Caste and Entrepreneurship in India,” Economic and Political Weekly 48, no. 6 (February 9, 2013): 52–60.
57. Sonalde Desai and Amaresh Dubey, “Caste in 21st Century India: Competing Narratives,” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 11 (March 12, 2012): 40–49.
58. This section draws on material which first appeared in Milan Vaishnav, “Resizing the State,” Caravan, October 1, 2012.
59. After independence, scholar Selig Harrison famously wrote of India: “The odds are almost wholly against the survival of freedom and . . . the issue is, in fact, whether any Indian state can survive at all.” Selig Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).
60. Indeed, the only regional peer that comes close to India’s level of support for democracy is Sri Lanka. Pakistan, in contrast, enjoys the highest level of support for nondemocrats. See Peter Ronald deSouza, Suhas Palshikar, and Yogendra Yadav, “Surveying South Asia,” Journal of Democracy 19, no. 1 (January 2008): 84–96.
61. There has been not only an increasing gap between the well-being of rural and urban Indians in terms of income but also a widening inequality among urban residents. S. Subramanian and D. Jayaraj, “Growth and Inequality in the Distribution of India’s Consumption Expenditure: 1983 to 2009–10,” UNU-WIDER Working Paper WP/2015/025 (February 2015). According to a 2014 report from investment bank Credit Suisse, whereas the richest 1 percent of Indians held just under 37 percent of the country’s wealth in 2000, that share grew to 49 percent in 2014. Quoted in Rukmini S., “India’s Staggering Wealth Gap in Five Charts,” Hindu, December 8, 2014.
62. Pew Research Center, Emerging and Developing Economies Much More Optimistic than Rich Countries about the Future (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2014).
63. Varshney, Battles Half Won, 39.
64. Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), chap. 12.
65. Lant Pritchett, “A Review of Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India,” Journal of Economic Literature 47, no. 3 (September 2009): 771–80.
66. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
67. Vaishnav, “Resizing the State.”
68. I thank Devesh Kapur for coming up with the distinction between the overbureaucratization in procedural terms and the undermanning of the Indian state in personnel terms.
69. Surjit Bhalla, “Dismantling the Welfare State,” in Bibek Debroy, Ashley Tellis, and Reece Trevor, eds., Getting India Back on Track: An Action Agenda for Reform (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2014), 51.
70. Devesh Kapur, “The Political Economy of the State,” in Niraja Jayal and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, eds., The Oxford Companion to Politics in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
71. Data on India’s performance according to the 2016 edition of the World Bank’s “Doing Business” indicators can be found at http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploreeconomies/india.
72. Marianne Bertrand, Rema Hanna, Simeon Djankov, and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Obtaining a Driving License in India: An Experimental Approach to Studying Corruption,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, no. 4 (2007): 1639–76.
73. Journalist and former union minister Arun Shourie has compiled a range of such examples in his book, Governance and the Sclerosis That Has Set In (New Delhi: Rupa, 2004).
74. Bibek Debroy, India: Redeeming the Economic Pledge (New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 2004), 133–34.
75. Milan Vaishnav and Reedy Swanson, “India: State Capacity in Global Context,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 2, 2012, http://carnegieendowment.org/2012/11/02/india-state-capacity-in-global-context (accessed January 1, 2013).
76. Government of India, Report of the Seventh Central Pay Commission (New Delhi: Government of India, 2015), http://7cpc.india.gov.in/pdf/sevencpcreport.pdf (accessed April 20, 2016).
77. These data come from India’s Ministry of Finance and are from 2011–12. Under Indian law, only individuals who earn more than 200,000 rupees per year are required to pay income tax. Given the paucity of credible income data, it is hard to know how large that potential pool is. One of India’s leading tax experts believes that with administrative reforms it is possible to widen the taxpayer base to at least 60 million individuals. See M. Govinda Rao, “Bridging the Tax Gap,” Business Standard, April 12, 2012.
78. “Income Tax Department Manpower Shortfall at 29.47%,” Press Trust of India, December 7, 2012, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-12-07/news/35670708_1_income-tax-department-shortfall-manpower (accessed August 25, 2012). In 2011, a senior tax official disclosed that tax authorities had to ration their monitoring capacity due to a shortage of officers. As a result of the severe staff crunch, “over 40% of assesses with an annual income above Rs. 10 lakh [1 million rupees]” would likely go unmonitored. See Apurv Gupta, “Income Tax Staff Crunch May Help You Escape Scrutiny,” Economic Times, July 16, 2011.
79. Krishna D. Rao and Sudha Ramani, “Human Resources for Health in India: Current Challenges and Policy Options,” in IDFC Foundation, India Infrastructure Report, 2013–14: The Road to Universal Health Coverage (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014).
80. Praveen Swami, “India’s Spy Agencies More Toothless than Ever,” Indian Express, December 1, 2014.
81. Sarah J. Watson and C. Christine Fair, “India’s Stalled Internal Security Reforms,” India Review 12, no. 4 (November 2013): 284.
82. Andrew MacAskill and Sanjeev Miglani, “India’s Intelligence Agency on the Cheap Hampers War on Militants,” Reuters, November 7, 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-security-intelligence-insight-idUSKBN0IR04420141107 (accessed November 10, 2014). India’s ability to project its influence around the world is also badly hamstrung by capacity constraints. For instance, India’s diplomatic corps is roughly the size of Singapore’s, despite the fact India has a population 200 times larger than that of the island nation and an economy more than six times as large. See Shashi Tharoor, “In the Ministry of Eternal Affairs,” Caravan, July 1, 2012.
83. Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, National Crime Records Bureau, Prison Statistics India 2012 (New Delhi: Ministry of Home Affairs, 2013), http://ncrb.nic.in/StatPublications/PSI/Prison2012/Full/PSI-2012.pdf (accessed July 13, 2014).
84. Data on personnel vacancies and pendency in the judiciary can be found in the quarterly “Court News” summaries issued by the Supreme Court. These are available at: http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/courtnews.htm. For an in-depth exploration of the issue of pendency, see Government of India, Law Commission of India, Arrears and Backlog: Creating Additional Judicial (Wo)manpower, Report No. 245 (New Delhi: Law Commission of India, July 2014), http://lawcommissionofindia.nic.in/reports/Report245.pdf (accessed October 1, 2014).
85. Kritika Sharma, “Citizens on Their Own as 45,000 Police Protect Delhi VIPs and Office Chores,” Mail Today, December 24, 2012.
86. Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 5.
87. Modernization is a fraught term because it often is used as a synonym for “Westernization.” In this chapter, I nevertheless use the term to remain consistent with Huntington’s terminology. For my purposes, modernization simply refers to a process of rapid social and economic development.
88. Huntington, Political
Order in Changing Societies, 60.
89. Ibid., 61–62.
90. Ibid., 59–60.
91. Aditi Gandhi and Michael Walton, “Where Do India’s Billionaires Get Their Wealth?” Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 40 (October 6, 2012): 10–14.
92. Naazneen Karmali, “For the First Time, India’s 100 Richest of 2014 Are All Billionaires,” Forbes India, September 24, 2014.
93. “An Unloved Billionaire,” Economist, July 31, 2014; Manu Joseph, “Letter from India: The Image of India’s Richest Man Loses Luster,” New York Times, July 23, 2014.
94. Government of India, Planning Commission, “Press Notes on Poverty Estimates, 2011–12,” July 22, 2013, http://planningcommission.nic.in/news/pre_pov2307.pdf (accessed July 23, 2013).
95. Raghuram Rajan, “Is There a Threat of Oligarchy in India?,” speech to the Bombay Chamber of Commerce, September 10, 2008, http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/raghuram.rajan/research/papers/is%20there%20a%20threat%20of%20oligarchy%20in%20india.pdf (accessed December 1, 2013).
96. This point is also made by Varshney, Battles Half Won, 41–42.
97. Milan Vaishnav, “India Needs More Democracy, Not Less,” Foreign Affairs, April 11, 2013, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/india/2013-04-11/india-needs-more-democracy-not-less (accessed April 12, 2013).
98. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “A Special Retreat,” Indian Express, March 19, 2013.
99. Vaishnav, “India Needs More Democracy, Not Less.”
100. Vanita Kohli-Khandekar, “The Booming Market for Newspapers,” Business Standard, June 3, 2013.
101. These data come from an infographic on television news in India produced by the newspaper Business Standard, March 25, 2011, http://www.business-standard.com/content/general_pdf/032511_01.pdf (accessed September 13, 2013).
102. World Bank, World Development Indicators database (accessed August 1, 2015); Government of India, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, “The Indian Telecom Services Performance Indicators, October–December 2014,” May 8, 2015, http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/PIRReport/Documents/Indicator_Reports%20-%20Dec-14=08052015.pdf (accessed August 4, 2015).
103. World Bank, World Development Indicators database (accessed August 1, 2015); Government of India, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, “Highlights of Telecom Subscription Data as on 31st May, 2015,” July 10, 2015, http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/WhatsNew/Documents/PR-32-TSD-May-15_10072015.pdf (accessed August 2, 2015).
104. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Burden of Democracy (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003), 20.
105. R. P. Kangle, The Kautilı¯ya Arthas´a¯tra, part 2 (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1969), 91.
106. This definition varies slightly from the classic definition of “grand corruption,” which refers to corruption occurring at the highest levels of government and involving major government projects and programs. See Susan Rose-Ackerman, Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences, and Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
107. Political scientist Jennifer Bussell argues that a third type of corruption (“mid-level corruption”) sits between the two poles of “grand” and “petty” corruption. Whereas grand corruption involves senior politicians receiving bribes to influence policy design and petty corruption refers to small bribe payments to low-level state actors for preferential service delivery, mid-level corruption involves intermediate-level bureaucrats and politicians taking bribes for influencing the implementation of public sector schemes. For illustrative purposes, I focus on the binary classification, but there is surely scope for more disaggregated categorization. See Jennifer Bussell, “Varieties of Corruption: The Organization of Rent-Seeking in India,” paper presented at the “Westminster Model of Democracy in Crisis” conference, Harvard University, May 13–14, 2013, https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/bussell.pdf (accessed April 22, 2015).
108. Sadanand Dhume, “India’s Crony Socialism,” Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2011.
109. Raghuram Rajan, “The Next Generation of Reforms in India,” speech at a function to re-release a book of essays in honor of Dr. Manmohan Singh, New Delhi, April 14, 2012, http://blogs.chicagobooth.edu/blog/Fault_Lines_by_Raghuram_Rajan/The_Next_Generation_of_Reforms_in_India/faultlines/49?nav=entry (accessed August 5, 2013).
110. Laura Alfaro and Anusha Chari, “India Transformed: Insights from the Firm Level 1988–2007,” India Policy Forum 6 (2009): 153–224.
111. “Dancing Elephants,” Economist, January 27, 2011.
112. Joel S. Hellman, “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions,” World Politics 50, no. 2 (January 1998): 203–34.
113. Rajan, “The Next Generation of Reforms in India.”
114. Laura Alfaro and Anusha Chari, “Deregulation, Misallocation, and Size: Evidence from India,” Journal of Law and Economics 57, no. 4 (November 2014): 897–936.
115. Anusha Chari and Nandini Gupta, “Incumbents and Protectionism: The Political Economy of Foreign Entry Liberalization,” Journal of Financial Economics 88, no. 3 (June 2008): 633–56.
116. Sumit Ganguly, “Corruption in India: An Enduring Threat,” Journal of Democracy 23, no. 1 (January 2012): 138–48.
117. Gandhi and Walton, “Where Do India’s Billionaires Get Their Wealth?”
118. KPMG, Survey on Bribery and Corruption: Impact on Economy and Business Environment (December 2011), https://www.kpmg.com/Global/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/Documents/bribery-corruption.pdf (accessed May 16, 2012). A 2009 study by consulting firm Deloitte states, “Corruption in India appears to be more widespread in the construction industry, especially in large infrastructure projects.” See Kerry Francis, Walt Brown, and Hema Hattangady, India and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (Deloitte Forensic Center, 2009), https://www.orrick.com/Events-and-Publications/Documents/2880.pdf (accessed May 10, 2012).
119. Surajit Mazumdar, “Big Business and Economic Nationalism in India,” Institute for Studies in Industrial Development Working Paper 2010/09, September 2010. See also Kanchan Chandra, “The New Indian State: The Relocation of Patronage in the Post-Liberalisation Economy,” Economic and Political Weekly 50, no. 41 (October 10, 2015): 46–58.
120. Simeon Djankov, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer, “The Regulation of Entry,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117, no. 1 (2002): 1–37.
121. Sandip Sukhtankar and Milan Vaishnav, “Corruption in India: Bridging Research Evidence and Policy Options,” India Policy Forum 11 (July 2015): 193–261.
122. Chandra, “New Indian State.”
123. Arvind Subramanian, “What Is India’s Real Growth Potential?” Business Standard, May 23, 2012.
124. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “It’s the Land, Stupid,” Indian Express, August 19, 2010.
125. One of the best primers on how land markets operate in India is Sanjoy Chakravorty, The Price of Land: Acquisition, Conflict, Consequence (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013).
126. Vaibhav Ganjapure, “Maharashtra Govt Spent Rs. 3.71 Crore on Adarsh Probe Panel: RTI Survey,” Times of India, February 15, 2014.
127. Samyabrata Roy Goswami, “If I Had Sent Them to Jail, Congress Would Have Been Finished: Prithviraj Chavan,” Telegraph (Calcutta), October 14, 2014.
128. Rajan, “New Generation of Reforms in India.”
129. India Brand Equity Foundation, “About Jharkhand: Industries, Mining, Economy, Exports, Tourism, Climate, Geography,” February 2016, http://www.ibef.org/states/jharkhand.aspx (accessed April 22, 2016).
130. Shantanu Guha Ray, “The Rise and Fall of King Koda,” Tehelka, November 14, 2009.
131. Smruti Koppikar and Saikat Datta, “Miner Sins,” Outlook, November 23, 2009; Manish Tiwari and Madan Kumar, “Koda Empire from Africa to Mumbai,” Hindustan Times, November 3, 2009.
132. “Madhu Koda Arrested,” Economic Times, December 1, 2009; “Coal Scam: Court Frames Charges against Madhu Koda, Eight Others,” Press Trust of India, July 31, 2015, h
ttp://zeenews.india.com/business/news/companies/coal-scam-court-frames-charges-against-madhu-koda-eight-others_132707.html (accessed April 21, 2016).
133. Neeraj Chauhan and Partha Sinha, “CBI Grills Top Tata Steel Officer in Madhu Koda Mining Scam,” Times of India, March 7, 2013.
134. “Madhu Koda Worked Overtime to Issue Mining Licences,” Economic Times, November 12, 2009.
135. Koppikar and Datta, “Miner Sins.”
136. Ibid.; Shantanu Guha Ray, “Decoding Koda,” Tehelka, November 21, 2009.
137. DMK leader Karunanidhi once claimed that his relationship with Raja was like that of “a child in the hands of [a] revered and respected leader.” See “A Raja Arrives in Chennai to a Hero’s Welcome, Karunanidhi Calls Him a Younger Brother,” Press Trust of India, June 8, 2012, http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/a-raja-tamil-nadu-supporters-dmk/1/199785.html (accessed June 16, 2015).
138. “2G Case: A. Raja Was Main Conspirator, Favoured Firms, Says CBI,” Press Trust of India, September 7, 2015, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/2g-case-a-raja-was-main-conspirator-favoured-firms-says-cbi/article7625584.ece (accessed November 8, 2015).
139. Sandip Sukhtankar, “The Impact of Corruption on Consumer Markets: Evidence from the Allocation of 2G Wireless Spectrum in India,” Journal of Law and Economics 58, no. 1 (February 2015): 75–109.
140. Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Performance Audit of Issue of Licences and Allocation of 2G Spectrum by the Department of Telecommunications (New Delhi: Comptroller and Auditor General, 2010), http://www.cag.gov.in/content/report-no-19-2010-performance-audit-issue-licences-and-allocation-2g-spectrum-union (accessed April 21, 2016).
141. See Vinay Kumar, “CBI Arrests Former Telecom Minister A. Raja,” Hindu, February 2, 2011. In the 2014 Lok Sabha election, Raja narrowly lost the Nilgiris constituency in Tamil Nadu, a seat he won in 2009, despite the fact that he actually polled more votes than he had five years earlier. In his 2014 election affidavit, Raja declared that charges had been framed against him in a pending corruption case in front of a special CBI court. The court granted Raja bail in this case in May 2012.
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