In December 2025, newspapers in India carried an arresting, dystopian image: scores of young people sitting obediently in rows on an airstrip in the eastern state of Odisha to take an exam. Over 8,000 test takers had lined up under the sun to compete for 187 posts in the police service. That so many people were willing to take an exam in such inhumane conditions is revealing. In India, government jobs have long been coveted because they bring financial security and a measure of social prestige. But the candidates in Odisha were vying for the lowest rung of the police service. Such a large volume of candidates for such a poorly paid post reflects widespread desperation among educated youth. India’s economy has failed to generate opportunities for the country’s many young people, even as it has recorded an average annual GDP growth rate of six to seven percent over the past three decades.

In the nearly 80 years since gaining its independence, in 1947, India has struggled to deliver broad-based prosperity. In that time, its economy has been through several transitions. It first took the broadly socialist path of centralized planning, state-controlled industrialization through public enterprises, and the raising of barriers to foreign trade. That orientation produced tepid growth, averaging 2.5 percent between 1950 and 1980. India concertedly liberalized its economy in the 1990s, embracing reforms that accelerated growth and massively reduced rates of extreme poverty, which fell from over 50 percent in the early 1980s to less than 20 percent by 2010.

But India failed to engender a deeper economic transformation. Most Indians remain stuck in low-quality, low-productivity jobs: as of 2024, 46 percent of the country’s workers were thought to be in agriculture, according to government data. India’s failings are stark when viewed comparatively. Its per capita GDP is less than one-fourth that of Brazil and one-sixth that of Turkey, two other aspirational middle powers. The gains from growth have been staggeringly unequal. India has more billionaires—205, according to a 2025 Forbes estimate—than any other country apart from the United States and China. At the same time, millions of young people ready to enter the workforce every year find few jobs on offer.

In their sweeping and statistically rich book, A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey, Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian describe the Indian economy as characterized by “prolonged ruralization, stunted industrialization, and precocious servicification.” They show that India did not follow the path that characterized many of the success stories of post–World War II development, including China, Japan, and South Korea. Those countries made investments in boosting agricultural productivity, which in turn raised rural incomes and laid the groundwork for labor-intensive manufacturing that fueled meaningful economic growth and eventually high-skilled services. Instead, India neglected agriculture and skipped lightly over low-skilled manufacturing, seeking to grow on the back of a highly skilled service sector. Kapur, a political scientist, and Subramanian, an economist and former chief economic adviser to the government of India, claim that this gamble has not paid off. India’s unusual path has locked the country into low productivity and low incomes.

Yet the problem, as they see it, rests not simply in economic policy but in the very nature of the Indian state. Kapur and Subramanian celebrate India’s democracy, which emerged in the inhospitable conditions of poverty, low literacy, and entrenched social inequality, as a signal achievement and warn against democratic backsliding under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. But they also suggest that democracy lies at the heart of the country’s economic woes. Democracy in India, they argue, was “precocious,” arriving early with the formal adoption of universal franchise in 1950 at relatively low levels of economic development. Electoral politics in these conditions created pressures that, on the one hand, precluded many of the radical changes needed for economic development (for instance, meaningful land reform) and, on the other, burdened a fledgling state and economy with a plethora of demands from all segments of society for access to subsidies, tax breaks, and regulatory........

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