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Refreshing departure from triumphant accounts of India’s growth trajectory

Satya Mohanty objectively dissects the GST structure, banking and MSMEs, and state finances, to predict that far from being an Asian Tiger, the economy could be heading for a sustained slowdown
Unpolitically Correct: The Politics and Economics of Governance by Satya Mohanty. Rupa. Pages 232. ~595
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Book Title: Unpolitically Correct: The Politics and Economics of Governance

Author: Satya Mohanty

Satya Mohanty has not pulled his punches about the infirmities he sees in politics and governance at the Centre since hanging up his boots as the NHRC secretary seven years back. He expressed his despondency, especially over India’s “castaways” — the migrants — during the Covid lockdown with a collection of poems. More recently, he was among the 90-plus former sentinels of India’s steel frame who publicly expressed concerns over the Centre’s changes to the All India Service Rules, which prohibit public servants from expressing their opinions on matters of national importance at the pain of revocation of pensions. He was also among the 93 former civil servants who endorsed a letter written by former IIM-Ahmedabad professor Jagdeep Chhokar on the speech given by PM Narendra Modi during election stumping in Rajasthan last year.
A prolific columnist as well, he has published articles on the distortions in economy, including the acclaimed ‘The hollowness of a $5-trillion economy’ in The Tribune. The book adds to a slim collection by a few intrepid ex-bureaucrats, led by former Finance Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg’s dripping-in-caustic-realism ‘We Also Make Policy’, that parts the curtains on the tightly-controlled policy formulation in the Modi era.
Not as granular as Garg’s book perhaps because Mohanty’s policy formulating spell lasted one year of the Modi government, yet, the sweep is wider and criticism is rarely held back. Mohanty objectively dissects the GST structure, banking and MSMEs, and state finances, to predict that far from being an Asian Tiger, the economy could be heading for a sustained slowdown. This prediction on the basis of detailed analyses of Central and state finances, and tax buoyancy, came well before the government recently admitted to weakening economic growth.
The jacket bills the book as provocative, iconoclastic and irreverent. That would be straitjacketing of what is a wide sweep of policy and implementation problems seen candidly and even-handedly through the lenses of a former policymaker. It also helps the reader look beyond the cascade of statistics that are the only window to policy-making at every level. Mohanty kicks off with an explanation on how crony capitalists, who typically acquire public assets and resources at suboptimal value, weaken the state’s capacity to lessen inequality, in turn leading to societal issues that need yet another framework for redressal.
Observing the government from close hand, he feels style has become content and “triumphalism is the style so everyone in the system learns to work on low hanging fruits... the system doesn’t have many who can differ with authority. In essence, no system prevails and only a compliant servitor occupies power”.
“There is no reprieve from the sinking feeling,” he notes, while trying to understand the economic mess, one of which is agriculture, where Mohanty pulls up the Centre for crowbarring the now-aborted farm laws through “stealth, lack of discussion and audacity without an alternative system”. But he feels the laws were sound and feels the Modi government only missed out the context of deliberation, consultation and the give-and-take for any policy to succeed. It is this non-ideological approach that gives credibility to his perception about the tanking quality of civil service recruits, or the need to end the absorption of ad hoc teachers as permanent faculty members in universities.
His account about the garbling of the GST structure is lucid, but an ordinary reader sometimes stumbles into an overload of didactic prose or motherhood and apple pie type of solutions to legacy problems in health, education and agriculture. One also wished for updating of some of the articles that are over three years old. Yet, this is a refreshing departure from hagiographic books that chronicle India’s trajectory as “aspiring”, “transforming” and “new”.
— The writer is a senior journalist
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