When a small boy tries to imitate his daddy, he is likely to fail. Once he is grown up, however, he will have little difficulty emulating the work habits of his senior colleagues.
In a paper titled
Premature Imitation and India’s Flailing State
SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN AND ALEXANDER TABARROK
suggest that India tried to imitate more mature economies. This is not the case. India wanted to split up on the basis of religion and then pursue ideologies- e.g. Gandhian Socialism, Islamic Fundamentalism- which had no takers in more technologically advanced countries.
The colonial authorities had begun promoting responsible worker's associaton from about the 1890s. The 'sweated labour' or 'unfair competition' argument was gaining currency in Westminster and the influence of Trade Unions increased. Interestingly, a Communist MP- Saklatvala, a cousin of the Tatas- was able to win elections by playing the 'coolie labour' card much to the disgust of Indian nationalists. Tory Secretary of States for India believed that by granting separate representation to Labour in legislative councils, the power of the Congress party would be diluted.
Trade Unionism proved lucrative for politicians and lawyers and the tight labour market which prevailed during the Second World War created a bonanza for workers in the organised sector. After independence, Congress took some steps to curb independent Trade Unions but the inertial force of the British legacy prevailed more particularly because India was a member of the International Labour Organisation.
This becomes obvious when you look at the timeline of Indian labour law.
1881 – First Indian Factories Act- restricted the employment and working hours of children while setting basic safety rules.
1890 – Bombay Mill Hands Association: Formed by N.M. Lokhande, marking the emergence of India's first organized labor welfare and advocacy effort. Lokhande was an associate of Phule both of whom were promoted by the British as having a positive influence on the lower castes. In particular, the Raj wanted poorer people to focus on economic grievances rather than unite under the banner of religion.
1891 – Indian Factories Act (Amended): Expanded factory coverage, raised the minimum age and reduced working hours for children, and introduced a weekly holiday and midday stoppage for women workers. [1]
1901 – Indian Mines Act: Extended safety and labor regulations to underground and surface mine workers.
1911 – Indian Factories Act: Restricted working hours for men in textile factories to 12 hours a day and further limited child labor hours.
1919 – International Labour Organization (ILO) Formation: Established via the Treaty of Versailles; India became a founding member, heavily influencing subsequent domestic labor standards.
1920 – All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) Formed: Created as the first central trade union federation in India to represent workers nationally and globally.
1922 – Factories Act: Extended protections to a broader range of power-using factories and standardized daily and weekly work limits.
1923 – Workmen’s Compensation Act: Provided financial compensation to employees for industrial accidents and occupational diseases resulting in death or disablement.
1926 – Indian Trade Unions Act: Gave legal recognition and immunity from civil/criminal prosecution to registered trade unions.
1929 – Trade Disputes Act: Provided mechanisms for the investigation and settlement of industrial disputes through courts or boards of conciliation.
1936 – Payment of Wages Act: Regulated the timely payment of wages and prohibited unauthorized deductions or arbitrary fines by employers.
1946 – Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act: Required employers in industrial establishments to formally define and communicate conditions of employment (standing orders).
1947 – Industrial Disputes Act: Replaced the 1929 act and established the primary framework for resolving strikes, lockouts, layoffs, and retrenchments.
After Independence, not imitation but instititutional inertia led to further legislation which, however, could be ignored with greater impunity by those who were politically connected.
Post-Independence & Modern Consolidation
1948 – Factories Act & Minimum Wages Act: The Factories Act 1948 overhauled health, safety, and working hours, while the Minimum Wages Act mandated state- and sector-specific baseline compensation.
Nehru was suspicious of the industrialists who had financed Congress. His Planning Commission, promoting nationalization as part and parcel of Socialism, created the 'licence-permit Raj' which hamstrung Indian industry. It must be said, labour militancy sponsored by Communists in West Bengal was even more successful in driving away industries. But the Commies were imitating Mao in an equally poor country. Unlike the West, where 'feminist' labour reform increased participation for women even in tough 'masculine' fields, India's paternalistic legislators tended to go in the reverse direction. However, because most private sector growth was in the small scale sector (or in fields reserved for 'cottage industries) the percentage of the workforce covered by legislation tended to fall.
1991 – Economic Liberalization: Sparked widespread privatization and a shift toward contractual and informal hiring practices.
2019–2020 – The Four Labour Codes: Consolidated over 40 central labor laws into four simplified codes—Code on Wages (2019), Industrial Relations Code (2020), Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code (2020), and Social Security Code (2020)—to streamline compliance and extend coverage to gig and platform workers.
This wasn't 'imitation'- premature or otherwise. The truth was that, as a senior Economic advisor said, to comply 100 percent with labour law, you would have to break at least 20 percent of them. In other words, labour law was a vast thicket of self-contradictory laws and procedures.
Shruti and Alex begin by quoting a West Indian origin economist who advised Nkrumah. He knew nothing about India.
'There is the same contrast even between people; between the few highly westernized, trousered, natives educated in western universities, speaking western languages, and glorifying in Beethoven, Mill, Marx or Einstein, and the great mass of their countrymen who live in quite other worlds. —W. Arthur Lewis, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour”
In the West Indies, the majority of the population had been enslaved and transported from their native land. A few were able to hang on to elements of their ancestral culture and religion. Most- especially in urban areas- were 'mimic men' of the sort satirized by V.S Naipaul.
But Tardean mimetics didn't arise in India- the truly rich and aristocratic made a point of not learning English- save in so far as it involved imitating horrible dictators like Stalin or Mao. After all, India had cme under the dominion of Turkic/Mongol Eurasian warlords- which is what both Stalin & Mao were. But the Indian government never crushed the peasantry by licensing man-made famines of a vast scale.
Lant Pritchett (2009) has called India a flailing state.
Indians called him a stupid cunt. Still, it is true that Manmohan was a 'prone' Minister.
A flailing state is what happens when the principal cannot control its agents.
by shooting them or sending them to a Gulag? American voters decided that Obama & Hilary were 'flailing'. In 2016 they voted for an elderly billionaire who had never held any sort of elected office or, indeed, Government job.
The flailing state cannot implement its own plans
because of budgetary constraints. But that was true of the Second, Third and Fourth Five year plan. There was also a Plan holiday in 1990-92. After that, there was enough money in the kitty but the private sector was taking the lead.
and may have its plans actively subverted when its agents work at crosspurposes.
Nehru's mistake was to put planning above budgeting. He was a deeply silly man. It is fucking obvious that, for the poor, only budgets matter. Pigs can't really fly, though they may plan to.
The Indian state flails because it is simultaneously too large and too small: too large because the Indian government attempts to legislate and regulate every aspect of citizens’ lives
No. There is an inherited inertia from the Bureaucratic Raj of the Windsor dynasty which persisted under the Gandhi dynasty. As in every other field, labour laws multiplied meaninglessly. There was 'rent seeking'- sure. But what defeats rent seeking is beating and extorting the rent-seeker. In other words, gangsterism has countervailing power over the politico/bureaucratic class. This is why so many legislators have criminal records. Admittedly, some of the charges are fabricated. Sadly, some have also been thrown out by the courts. Rahul didn't really rape a girl with the help of his foreign friends.
and too small because it lacks the resources and personnel to rule according to its ambitions.
One might say this about the Second Five year plan. Back then, Nehru & Nkrumah thought that the Yanks & the Soviets would compete in building infrastructure and heavy industry essentially for free.
To explain the mismatch between the Indian state’s ambitions and its abilities, we point to the premature demands by Indian elite for policies more appropriate to a developed country.
Indian elites aren't stupid. They weren't demanding that their own dividend income be cut so that workers could have a better quality of life.
One could say- as Edwin Lim, of the World Bank, did- that Indian 'activists' get paid a lot of money by Western NGOs to indulge in virtue signalling and create road-blocks for development. But, it is easy to beat activists or just chase them away, That's what happened to Medha Patkar once the Gujjus got organised. They got their Narmada water and made very good use of it.
We illustrate with four case studies on maternity leave,
The public sector gets 730 days of Child Care Leave (CCL)- a very valuable benefit.
housing policy, open defecation,
which directly relates to health outcomes & the safety of rural women
and education policy.
which is shit.
We then conclude by discussing how the problem of limited state capacity
what limits power is countervailing power
points to presumptive laissez-faire as a preferred governing and learning environment for developing countries.
Sadly, that involves getting colonised in one manner or another. Armies and Navies don't arise by the unfettered working of the market.
Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett, and Michael Woolcock (2017) point to one explanation for India’s flailing state. In order to satisfy external actors, the Indian state and other recipients of foreign funding often take on tasks that overwhelm state capacity, leading to premature load bearing.
No. Foreign funded 'activists' can be a nuisance but it is easy and satisfying to beat them or just threaten them till they run the fuck away. Manmohan started the trend of going after the funding of these 'cockroaches'. He suspected that Western coal exporters, etc, wanted to prevent India exploiting its own mineral resources.
As these authors put it, “By starting off with unrealistic expectations of the range, complexity, scale, and speed with which organizational capability can be built, external actors set both themselves and (more importantly) the governments they are attempting to assist to fail” .
No. The 'activists' just want money and fame by winning some sort of International prize & getting funded by foreign foundations.
The expectations of external actors are only one source of imitation, however.
Tardean mimetics is about getting money and power by imitating those who were similar to you but who are now much better off.
Who people read, listen to, admire, learn from, and wish to emulate is also key.
No. What matters is reinforcement. I imitate both Beyonce & a janitor. I get paid for the latter, not the former activity. That's why I am a full time janitor rather than a Beyonce impersonator.
We argue that another factor driving inappropriate imitation is that the Indian intelligentsia
doesn't exist. The Dalit intellectual is different from the Muslim or RSS intellectual.
—the top people involved in politics, the bureaucracy, universities, think tanks, foundations, and so forth—are closely connected with Anglo-American elites,
There is a circulation of elites. India is not synchronised with Anglo-America. Even if the CJP or CEA studied in the West, that was thirty years ago when a different ideology prevailed.
sometimes even more closely than they are to the Indian populace.
One might say this about both political leaders in the west. They are fighting yesterday's battles or seeking to revive ideas which passed their sell-by date fifty years ago.
As a result, the Indian elite initiates and supports policies that appear to it to be normal even though such policies may have little relevance to the Indian population
fuck would these two cunts know about what is relevant to Indians?
as a whole and may be wildly at odds with Indian state capacity. This kind of mimicry of what appear to be the best Western policies and practices is not necessarily ill intentioned.
India shouldn't have become independent. It's intention may have been good- it wanted to be a proper nation state- but it was misguided. Indians are shit. They should be ruled by White peeps not brown peeps imitating White peeps.
Also, Shruti should kill herself. She is trying to imitate an Economist but can't succed because she don't got a dick. Sad.
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.
Intellectuals have never held power in India. True, Nehru wrote some books. Some may have thought this made him an intellectual. But he got to be PM because he was a Hindi speaking Brahmin who had put in enough jail time. Nobody thought the cow-belt dominated Indian politics because its people were smarter or better educated. Rather, it was because 'Pandy's rebellion' had succeeded. The littoral states benefitted more from overseas trade & thus might favour the revival of foreign dominated enclaves which might, once again, expand into the hinterland. Also, the Hindi speakers had shown vim and vigor in ethnically cleansing Muslims. They could come in handy at some future time. Niradh Chaudhuri, who had begged Whitey to come back to rule India, paid a back-handed compliment to the 'bhaiyyas' by pointing out their genuine loathing for Europeans.
The Indian elites are more likely, because of their background, to engage with global experts in policy dialogues that have little relevance to the commoner in India.
Policy dialogues are shit- always and everywhere.
In the next sections, we discuss the flailing state and the demographics of the Indian elite.
Back in the Fifties & Sixties, the State Dept (& the CIA) financed American Sociologists like Shils to gas on about native 'intelligentsias'. Then, they realised, it was a waste of time. Peasants, it turned out, were rational. Eggheads were addled.
We then illustrate with case studies on maternity leave, housing policy, open defecation, and right-to-education policy how India passes laws and policies that
are populist. The hope is they will gain votes in the short run while becoming, or remaining, ineffective longer term.
make sense to the elite but are neither relevant nor beneficial to the vast majority of Indians.
If they create vote-banks, they serve their purpose. Even if few gain a benefit- e.g. reservations in government jobs- the many will vote to keep that entitlement.
We conclude with a discussion of the optimal governing and learning environment when state capacity is limited.
What limits state capacity is either the law- which totalitarian methods- or countervailing power of various sorts.
The Flailing State In India, corruption often takes the form of circumventing the law. Some 30 percent of driver’s licenses are estimated to be fake (PTI 2016).
Studies show that roughly 20% to 33.5% of college students in the US have used or owned a fake ID.
Of the licenses that aren’t fake, a large number of drivers manage to avoid taking the driver’s test, which leads to unqualified drivers and more accidents on the roads (Bertrand et al. 2007). It’s possible to tell a story in which these outcomes are a design from the top, but it’s more realistic to see them as a consequence of agents who do not obey principals—a flailing state.
The British inherited an administration where low-level corruption was the rule. The way to reduce it is to reduce State capacity- i.e. run a 'night-watchman' state. But, as Prasad told Gandhi, even paying for the village 'chowkidar' was considered onerous by the Bihari rustic.
To eliminate corruption you need to pay a living wage. But, in that case, the threat of 'transfer' is meaningless. Politicians lose their own lever of power over government servants.
This is a story about 'mechanism design', not agent principal hazard.
In China, this kind of corruption leads to executions.
Sometimes & in some places. It is always possible to purge corruption at the local level without killing people.
The executions don’t happen in India, one feature or bug of democracy, but that shouldn’t be taken to imply acquiscence. The top-level bureaucracy is of very high quality.
Really not. Good mechanism design is about subsidiarity & self-screening or self-certiification. It is in the interest of truck drivers that truck drivers aren't drug addicted nutters. Let them self-certify on a local basis. Different states can ban drivers from poorly self-policing regions.
The rot in India usually does not come from the head (Vaishnav and Khosla 2016).
Sadly, the head does what the stomach wants it to do. Even in Singapore, there seems to be a problem of elite 'self-dealing'.
Eight Singapore public officers have been referred to the police following a government investigation into claims that civil servants used non-public information to buy private properties near future Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) stations before they were publicly announced.
The investigation was launched after a September 2026 working paper published by the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) alleged that Singaporean civil servants and their relatives bought an estimated S$270 million (US$210 million) worth of property near planned train stations ahead of public disclosure.
Since academic economists made this discovery, it must be completely wrong.
Part of the problem is a simple lack of personnel.
No. Auxillaries can always be hired, or voluntary groups (e.g. Home Guard) can be expanded without creating a big pension & other welfare obligation. There is resistance to this, but it happens by default.
India, for example, has surprisingly few government workers
depending on your definition of government worker.
—about one-fifth as many per capita as the United States. The number of police per capita, for example, is only 135 per 100,000, one of the lowest rates in the world and far below the median (318) or mean (333) of police officers per 100,000 capita in the rest of the world (UN Office on Drugs and Crime 2017).
These figures overcount the populatiion & under count those who discharge police functions. Nobody knows how many Gram Chowkidars there actually are. Often, the post attracts no salary but comes with benefits in kind.
Moreover, a significant number of the police are assigned to VIPs rather than to protecting the public at large (Vaishnav 2017).
About 66,000 police personnel were deployed to protect 20,000 VIPs. There are over 2 million police personnel. So we are only speaking of about 3 percent of the total. Moreover, there is a 'spill-over' benefit to the neighbours of VIPs (who tend to live in swanky areas) as well as increased confidence that terrorists and gangsters won't be able to capture the State. However, if there is an insurgency, extra-judicial killing on an industrial scale can be done swiftly and thoroughly. India is a 'hard state' because the Army is loyal.
The number of judges per capita (12 per million) is far below the U.S. rate (108 per million), which helps to explain India’s enormous backlog of 32 million cases, millions of which have been in process for more than a decade (Joshi 2017).
Fewer judges would mean less backlog. India's problem is that the Judiciary doesn't believe in Res Judicata. Also, case management should be done by a separate agency.
Although most of India’s governance problems can find links to the lack of manpower in state services, there is also the problem of regulatory overload.
Which is a much smaller problem in India than the US because the organised sector is 15 percent not 85 percent.
The top levels of government impose a massive regulatory burden that is increasing each year, with little attention paid to personnel and state capacity. Many regulatory and civil offenses are increasingly categorized as criminal offenses and arbitrarily enforced (Rajagopalan 2017). India has essentially all the inspections, regulations, and laws a developed country such as the United States has, but at approximately $235 of federal spending per capita the Indian government simply cannot accomplish all the tasks it has assumed.
This silly woman doesn't get that there are no fucking regulatory tasks to do with the unorganised sector.
Still, broadly speaking, Shruti is right. She should not try to imitate Economists because she does not have a penis. By regulating herself not to bleed from the cooch once a month, she is proving herself to be just as stupid and ignorant as the Indians who, with tragic results, started imitating White peeps who have proper Nation-States of their own
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