'A Sixth of Humanity': Revisiting the idea and project of India

Instead of listing reforms, A Sixth of Humanity by Arvind Subramanian and Devesh Kapur identify necessary conditions that would give India a fair shot at solving important challenges ahead. An excerpt

For several months of the year, the people in New Delhi, the pulsating heart and prestigious capital of India, and the urban agglomeration of thirty-three million people around it, live in an ‘open-air gas chamber’, as a former Chief Justice of India put it. At times, the darkness-at-noon quality of light can have an eerie, apocalyptic foreboding. The air quality routinely breaches hazardous levels of safety.

 

Yet, despite the tangible (health and other) costs, not just to the poor but the middle class and elite, particularly egregious for their children, being experienced in the now rather than in the future