July 29- Premature Imitation and India's Flailing State

This post is just to tell the readers about this paper, by Alex Tabbarok and Shruti Rajagopalan, titled Premature Imitation and India’s Flailing State. 

The paper discusses the idea that India is a flailing state as in where the principal cannot control its agent. Where the highly skilled head is not attached to the ground of realities. This, the authors feel, is because “The Indian state is simultaneously too large and too small: too large because the Indian government attempts to legislate and regulate every aspect of citizens’ lives and too small because it lacks the resources and personnel to rule according to its ambitions”.

The flailing state idea was mooted by Lanat Pritchett in 2009 and since then there have been many studies to confirm the same. One of the main reasons for this flailement is normalised corruption in the lower rungs of the government. Citizens feel bribing is more cost-effective and efficient than complying with the numerous regulations laid down by the State-even where it is unnecessary. They give the hotel example. If a hotel were to function in India, it will necessarily violate one regulation or the other. This is due to the plethora of regulations- some violating each other, thereby confusing the entrepreneur. Therefore she feels bribing is fine and even cost-effective. 

This approach to bribing is prevalent due to what they call ‘enforcement swamping’. “At a low level of bribe taking, a small enforcement squad can capture most bribe takers; but the probability of being caught can decline as bribe taking increases”. The authors posit that it is due to unnecessary regulation and non-enforceable laws that the State is not able to control compliance. Because the State tries to be at all places at once- but does not have the capacity to do so. 

Given India’s low State capacity, one might assume that it will spend most of its capacity on things that matter to most Indians. But as discussed earlier, the State is too large and too thin- focussing on everything under the sky. This is more exacerbated by the fact that the policy elite and lawmakers tend to imitate western regulation and laws without accounting for the fact that India is a young country with low State capacity. 

This part of the paper was the most interesting to me.  

The authors identify three characteristics of the policy elite- English, Caste, Education outside India. In most cases, top policy experts have been living and working outside India. They give examples of Arvind Panagaria, Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramaniam- who left for the US the same day his term ended as the economic adviser. The problem with this is that policy experts discuss and debate in international conferences and various academic universities on the issues of the world. They try to think of the best practices that can be imported straight to India- irrelevant of the ground realities. The authors argue that Indian elite policy makers are imitating ‘foreign policies that are inappropriate given the level of domestic development’. 

Four case studies are done to substantiate the argument- Maternity leave, Housing regulation, Open defecation and the Right to education. I’ll try to explain their argument on maternity leave, for others, you can always read their paper.

The maternity benefit bill passed in 2017 mandates twenty six weeks of paid maternity leave, up from the twelve weeks earlier. This is one of the most progressive laws in the world. Only Canada and Norway have longer benefits. On paper there is nothing wrong with the legislation, in fact, it will empower most women of India- well, they don’t think so.

For starters, Canada’s and Norway’s GDP per-capita is twenty seven and forty seven times higher than India respectively. The issue for the authors with the maternity law “is not simply that it is generous by world standards, especially for a poor country, but that it has so little applicability to the great bulk of the Indian female population”. Based on their calculations, the law will apply to 1.3 percent of the female workforce or a mere 1 percent of women in India. It therefore applies to a minority of the population- mostly their fellow elites; and could be a negative effect in the women labour market for the remaining.

This is what they call ‘phantom legislation’-“the passing of laws which do not have, and most probably cannot have the desired effect. The illusion of progress, of doing something, is given, but the reality is far different. Such legislation is an expression, not of power but of the impotence of power”. These unrealistic legislation help the elites feel Just and Moral; the approval of the international community is the icing on the cake for them. 

It is important to understand that developed countries have these regulations and laws because of the fact that they are developed- they have taken care of basic problems which we struggle with in India. Given India’s low state capacity, these well-intentioned but non-relevant legislation spread the government more thinly. The opportunity cost of spending time and man hours trying to regulate something which has little relevance to most Indians is very high for a developing state like India. This is what they call premature imitation.  

However, the authors think that “this kind of mimicry of what appear to be the best Western policies and practices is not necessarily ill intentioned. It might not be pursued to pacify external or internal actors, and it is not a deliberate attempt to exclude the majority of citizens from the democratic policy-making process. It is simply one by-product of the background within which the Indian intellectual class operates”    

Similarly, the same problem also creeps into culture and society- like it always has. My friend, a fellow writer of this blog, shared with me an Instagram handle of a ‘bookstagrammer/booktuber’. That person, like many others in his economic and social background, falls into the same category of elites who imitate western world in politics and culture. They are more concerned with safe spaces and trigger words. For instance the aforementioned bookstagrammer recently went on and on about an author’s comments on a politically sensitive (in the West) topic and how everyone should actively boycott the author’s books. Sometime earlier, the same person went on a rant about how the person in discussion unfollowed people who do not provide subtitles for every video because they are being ‘deafophobic’. People like this person have to feel morally superior and Just than others- these are considered world best practices, but does it have any relevance to the majority of Indian society or its current problems? 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you cannot have opinions and beliefs on Western politics- you can, I do. The point I’m trying to make is that if people could spend more time in understanding Indian society and its problems at the ground level instead of importing social standards from the West, it would be better- will it not? 

[Paper] Premature Imitation and India’s Flailing State by Shruti Rajagopalan and Alex Tabbarok. 

[Podcast] Also listen to ‘The Seen and the Unseen Epi: 180, where the authors discuss their paper and other things in general.