Grand Tamasha · Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

A Sixth of Humanity and the Dreams of a Nation

October 22, 2025·1 hr 21 min·5 clips

India's first 30 years were a scarcity economy, not import substitution.

Milan Vaishnav frames the book as a serious attempt to trace the developmental history of independent India at a national scale. The book is presented as the joint work of Devesh Kapoor and Arvind Subramaniam. Kapoor is the Starr Foundation Professor of South Asia Studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and the introduction also describes him as one of India's most respected political scientists. Subramaniam is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India. The conversation treats the book as drawing on politics, history, literature, and economics. It starts from the claim that India tried to do four things at once: build a state, create an economy, change society, and forge a sense of nationhood under universal suffrage. Vaishnav presses on the ways the early decades favored elites and large public projects. That choice, the discussion suggests, also contributed to neglecting agriculture. The conversation then reaches the familiar image of dams as modern temples. But the sharper point is not that India used too much concrete. It is that it did not build enough of it, or move it efficiently enough, to finish projects on time. Scarcity sat in the middle of everything. Cement and steel were constrained. The public sector was inefficient. Railways and transport bottlenecks slowed things further. The result was delay, and delay made capital projects more expensive and less effective. The episode also argues that India underinvested in infrastructure and public goods in the early years. Only in the late 1990s and 2000s did that begin to recover. The conversation uses that history to think about the next 75 years. It stays analytical rather than triumphant, which makes it especially useful for listeners who want the argument behind the headline.

As heard by us

India's development story, traced through state-building, scarcity, and the costs of delay.

Grand Tamasha treats A Sixth of Humanity as a study of India trying to build a state, shape an economy, reform society, and define nationhood all at once.

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Why you'd press play

For a serious look at how India tried to build a state, an economy, a society, and a nation at once.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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