Podcast: How can India fix its deep-seated economic and political problems?

It has now been nearly two years since Ashoka Mody published India Is Broken. In his book, Mody – formerly a deputy director at the International Monetary Fund and a visiting professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs – paints a searing portrait of India’s political and economic performance since 1947. This is a dystopian “India story”: a broken political system; a decayed moral and social fabric; squandered human capital; and an economy that continues to underperform despite hype, boosterism, and publicity.

What has changed in the last two years? In this episode of Past Imperfect, Mody brings his story up to date, and he remains pessimistic. As he has written in a new forward to his book, recently published in two parts (here and here) in Scroll, India is now “more broken.” Despite the setback to Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party in the recent general election, political norms have not changed, and the Opposition is as clueless as the ruling coalition about solving India’s endemic social and economic problems.

India is Broken is, above all, a history of joblessness. Mody departs from other accounts of India’s recent economic trajectory which have bullishly focused on GDP growth. Instead, he examines...

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