Our Technocratic Approach To Institutions Has Failed Us

Context: While our economy has changed, but some fundamental faults remain much the same.

Fundamental faults in the Indian economy

• Widened inequality: Other than electoral equality, in all other spheres, especially in the economic and social spheres, be it education, health, income, employment, housing, the inequality is gross and has widened over time.
  • In fact, it has become tragic in 2021 with ‘vaccine apartheid’ among and within countries.
  • The process of trickle-down has become a process of flowing up of wealth.
• Misfit institutions: Many of the institutions which we have given ourselves after 1947 have not emerged out of our own historical experience.
  • Institutions are the rules of the game with which societies function; however, relatively gradual evolutionary process in Europe were grafted in India much more hurriedly.
• Technocratic approach to institutions:
  • The world is seen as a machine, admittedly a complicated one, but one that can be controlled with the right pressure on this button.
  • It is a world in which everything can be quantified, and targets can not only be set, they can be achieved thanks to the cleverness of experts. But the world is simply not like this. It is a much more complex, much less controllable place than ‘rational’ planners believe.
  • Reforms of institutions require the skills of gardeners, not engineers:
    • Good gardeners are sensitive to the condition of the soil in which they plant seeds.
    • Whereas engineers work best with a tabula rasa, a clean sheet to draw their blueprint on, or a clean piece of land.

Conclusion:

• India will not meet its tryst with destiny until it changes its paradigm of progress.
• The economy must serve society and its people, rather than humans seen as bits of data in economists’ equations serving the economy as mere producers and consumers.