That's No Way to Run a Country

Book excerpt: A critical look at India today and the challenges it faces. We take a pessimistic viewpoint of India’s future—one shared by many leading thinkers wiser than ourselves. We see India’s weaknesses as being far too deep-rooted, and intertwined, to allow of easy solution. To make this point, this excerpt from the book examines three areas in modern India which exhibit serious dysfunction. We take no particular pleasure in reciting all these problems; we present them as a way to demonstrate clearly the existence of the dysfunction and its nature. We enumerate specific examples of dysfunction in each area in detail, and discuss the reasons for the dysfunction and the prospects, or lack thereof, for dealing with it.