ASEAN-India-Australia: Towards Closer Engagement in a New Asia

16. The Problem of Governance in India

16 The Problem of Governance in india Sarbeswar Sahoo There has always been debate about India’s underdevelopment and problem of governance not only at the level of intellectual and academic discourse, but also among ordinary people. Why has India remained economically underdeveloped and politically ungovernable? Although India’s economy has been growing at a rate of more than 9 per cent and the number of USD millionaires has grown by 20.5 per cent, which is second only to Singapore,1 India’s economy has been, in comparison to East and Southeast Asia, afflicted by poverty and underdevelopment. This growth in India is, in fact, very recent. The blame for India’s problem of governance and economic underdevelopment is often attributed to India’s “democracy”. The case of Singapore and some other Asian countries, has led some to consider strong, authoritarian governments to be positively correlated with economic growth. There have been many explanations in political sociology about the relationship between development and democracy and I often have felt handicapped in attempting to explain such problems in terms of pure practicality, rather than in abstract theoretical terms. There are many theories which explain that there is a very strong and positive correlation between economic prosperity and development of democracy.2 Huntington has argued that the “third wave” of democratization is a result of the economic development which has led to the rise of the urban middle class and created “new sources of wealth and power outside the state and a functional need to 269 270 Sarbeswar Sahoo devolve decision-making”.3 Many of the countries in East and Southeast Asia and in the Middle East have proven the “third wave” theorists, who believe that economic growth and emergence of the middle class will further the process of democratization, wrong. Similarly, many have also argued that democracy is impossible in situations where poverty, illiteracy, and inequality continue to dominate the socio-political climate; and that India, however, has successfully defied this proposition.4 Though the governments (irrespective of party affiliations) play a significant role in shaping a country’s economic development, the type of regime (democracy or authoritarianism) that a country is following has little to do with its economic development. India’s problem of governance and economic underdevelopment is not because of its democracy but the result of its successive corrupt and inefficient governments. The economic success of many East Asian and Southeast Asian countries is not simply because they are/were ruled by authoritarian regimes, but the result of effective governance implemented by their different governments. There are many democracies in the world such as the United States and Britain that possess highly developed economies. In comparison, there are authoritarian states such as Pakistan and many African states that have remained economically backward. Similarly, many of the Communist states in Eastern Europe have failed to deliver economic benefits to their people and their state structures were inflicted with corruption, unaccountability, and the worst forms of governance. However the Chinese communist state has emerged as the fastest growing economy in the world today. These widely contrasting examples show that the correlation of authoritarianism with economic prosperity or democracy with poverty and economic underdevelopment fails at explaining the issue of development and governance. This chapter argues that it is not the form of regime, but the form and nature of governance that matters for the economic and human development of a particular country. A country is poor not because of the kind of regime it has, but because of the kind of governance its governments/state, markets, and civil societies implement and practise. There are many informal and formal actors involved in the processes of governance. They play a significant role in the development and democratization of the country. All these factors could be clubbed under three basic categories: (1) the state, (2) the market, and (3) civil society. Though these are three different aspects and agents of governance, the boundary and relationship between them is often overlapping and blurred. No watertight compartmentalization is being made among these concepts here. My concern is to show how the problem of governance in India is a corollary to the kind of role these three agencies have played in relation to the interests, rights, and entitlements of the ordinary people. The Problem of Governance in India 271 Governance and The World bank Governance in its broader sense embraces the wider concerns...