Has India’s ‘flailing state’ been turned upside down?
By: Vaishnav, Milan
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Material type: 
BookPublisher: Seminar Description: 749, Jan, 2022: p.25-29.
In:
SeminarSummary: OVER the decades, there has been no paucity of pithy characterizations of the Indian state. In the late 1960s, economist Gunnar Myrdal famously referred to India as possessing a ‘soft state’, characterized by deficiencies in the observance and enforcement of rules and regulations, widespread corruption, and a general unwillingness to adhere to the rule of law.1 Two decades later, political scientists Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph referred to the paradox of India’s ‘weak-strong state’, in which the state careened between autonomous and reflexive relations with an assertive society.2 The state was, at once, dominant and highly vulnerable to centrifugal forces.
However, the appellation that has been most widely embraced in the post-liberalization era is the ‘flailing state’, coined by the economist Lant Pritchett in 2009.3 In Pritchett’s words, India was a country in which its apex institutions (the ‘head’) appeared robust but local governance (the ‘limbs’) was mired in crisis. Pritchett’s shorthand soon became ubiquitous because it encapsulated an obvious paradox. – Reproduced
| Item type | Current location | Call number | Vol info | Status | Date due | Barcode |
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Articles
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Indian Institute of Public Administration | 749, Jan, 2022: p.25-29 | Available | AR127148 |
OVER the decades, there has been no paucity of pithy characterizations of the Indian state. In the late 1960s, economist Gunnar Myrdal famously referred to India as possessing a ‘soft state’, characterized by deficiencies in the observance and enforcement of rules and regulations, widespread corruption, and a general unwillingness to adhere to the rule of law.1 Two decades later, political scientists Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph referred to the paradox of India’s ‘weak-strong state’, in which the state careened between autonomous and reflexive relations with an assertive society.2 The state was, at once, dominant and highly vulnerable to centrifugal forces.
However, the appellation that has been most widely embraced in the post-liberalization era is the ‘flailing state’, coined by the economist Lant Pritchett in 2009.3 In Pritchett’s words, India was a country in which its apex institutions (the ‘head’) appeared robust but local governance (the ‘limbs’) was mired in crisis. Pritchett’s shorthand soon became ubiquitous because it encapsulated an obvious paradox. – Reproduced
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