India's current economic challenges stem largely from policy failures
approval from the pumped-up crowd packing a stadium in Houston, Texas, India’s prime minister gave his answer to the local greeting. “You ask, ‘Howdy, Modi?’, so I say, ‘Everything is fine in India!’” The prime minister repeated the phrase in half a dozen Indian languages, drawing more roars from different parts of the crowd. Narendra Modi is a master at turning such shows to his advantage. For more than 4m Indian-Americans, he had subtly equated his own person with the Old Country.
Judging by his first term, and his government’s trajectory in the early months of his second, the answer is not at all clear. A great deal of hype accompanied Mr Modi’s arrival on the national scene in 2014. He was praised as a can-do, pro-business pragmatist who would wipe clean and shape up a government widely seen as venal and rotten. Yet Mr Modi’s first five years proved in many ways a wasted opportunity.
India is not easy to govern. What other country has nearly 800 spoken languages, 22 of them languages of state? And what other society is fragmented into more than 3,000 castes, each with its own proud creation myth? Some caste rigidities have softened over time, but the structure is remarkably robust: even now only one in 20 marriages crosses barriers of caste. India’s large Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist and Jain minorities often claim to be free of caste.
Understandably, India’s many fractures generate anxieties. This is especially true when the pace of change accelerates, and when awareness of differences grows. Although India’s population growth at national level has slowed markedly, the total tally is still expected to overtake China’s by 2027. India faces both a big bulge in working-age people and a growing rural exodus. Unemployment figures are unreliable, but the trend is unmistakable.
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