#91 Hope And Despair In India🎧

<em>This newsletter is really a public policy thought-letter. While excellent newsletters on specific themes within public policy already exist, this thought-letter is about frameworks, mental models, and key ideas that will hopefully help you think about any public policy problem in imaginative ways. It seeks to answer just one question: </em><strong><em>how do I think about a particular public policy problem/solution?</em></strong><br/><br/><em>Welcome to the mid-week edition in which we write essays on a public policy theme. The usual public policy review comes out on weekends.</em><br/><br/><em>PS: If you enjoy listening instead of reading, we have this edition available as an audio narration on all podcasting platforms courtesy the good folks at </em><a target="_blank" href="https://www.ad-auris.com/"><em>Ad-Auris</em></a><em>. If you have any feedback, please send it to us.</em><br/><br/><em>- RSJ</em><br/><br/>If you haven’t been living under a rock, you would have come across this <a target="_blank" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-opinion-india-and-modi-are-losing-china-battle/">Andy Mukherjee column in Bloomberg</a> over the last weekend. Titled ‘Why I’m Losing Hope In India’, it is a searing and despairing piece on how India is losing its window of opportunity for growth and prosperity. By Mukherjee’s own high standards of writing op-eds, it is a tour de force. <br/><br/>Predictably, the reactions to it have swung between extremes. There are those for whom Mukherjee has voiced, in limpid prose, their anxieties and disappointments with how things are turning out in India. For others, this is another elite, wringing his hands and pandering to his own discredited lot, as a new and different India takes shape. The few belonging to neither camps have praised the piece for raising pertinent issues but have taken exception to the deep pessimism pervading it. <br/><br/>Now, there are occasions when we too receive mails berating us for our pessimism about India. It is a criticism we fail to compreh