Abstract
India, in recent years, has drawn global attention for not only being the world's largest democracy, but for emerging as the third largest economy after the United States and China. Corbridge, Harriss and Jeffrey have tried to explain the profound transformation in the Indian economy and politics that has unfolded over the last decade. The book is organised into three parts –economy, politics and society – consisting of 15 chapters that try to answer 13 specific questions, including: When and why did India take off? Has India's democracy been a success? Does caste still matter in India? The book mostly concentrates on development since 2000, although it provides background material for readers who are new to the study of India. What is fascinating is the engagement with new scholarship by social scientists on India. The authors have tried to critique various theories, which are largely derived from the experience of the West, based on the evidence emerging from India. They have questioned path-dependency theory on the basis of India's adoption of economic reforms in the 1980s, which according to them, was a major shift from the past.
While seeking to answer ‘when and why did India take off?’, Corbridge et al. critique the idea of a uniform take-off by showing the importance and contribution of each decade in India's economic growth that subsequently facilitated major economic reforms in the 1980s or 1990s. The creation of vibrant institutions in the early decades of the 1950s and 1960s played a vital role in sustaining the subsequent economic reforms. The authors argue that while institutions are important, it is ultimately politics that plays a determining role in national development.
Despite some remarkable policy innovations to ensure economic and social rights, ‘social justice remains a field of contestation’ (p. 117). Although the incidence of ‘extreme poverty’ has declined in India since the 1970s, there are still sizable numbers of Indians who are living on less than two dollars a day. The failure of the Indian state to provide free and compulsory education to all children until the age of 14 is ‘perhaps the most damning of all its failures in the post-independence period’ (p. 105). Notwithstanding many difficulties, formal democracy has been a success in India, and there is also evidence of a move towards substantive democracy as people are actively participating in non-electoral politics.
This book makes a valuable contribution to the existing literature on the subject by providing a critical and balanced understanding of India's economic, political and social transformation in recent years. It would be useful to the scholars of Indian politics, comparative politics and political economy as well as to policy makers.