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100			_aVaishnav, Milan _934494
245			_aHas India’s ‘flailing state’ been turned upside down?
260			_aSeminar
300			_a749, Jan, 2022: p.25-29
520			_aOVER 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
773			_aSeminar
906			_aECONOMIC DEVELOPOMENT - INDIA
942			_cAR