I spent roughly six months trying to understand India.
Not all of India. That would be a life’s work. I was trying to understand something more specific: why a country with this many intelligent, capable, motivated people consistently produces institutional outcomes that fall well short of what those people deserve.
I’ve read a lot about Indian economics and politics over the years — the kind of general reading that gives you an approximate model of a complicated place. What I hadn’t done was go deep. Domain by domain. Past the op-eds and the think-tank summaries and into the actual research.
So that’s what I did. Twelve domains. Governance, judicial systems, economic structure, education, healthcare, bureaucracy, inequality, infrastructure, information ecosystem, social trust, environmental sustainability, and digital governance. Twelve research documents, built from empirical studies, economic analyses, and comparative data.
Here’s what I found — and what I didn’t expect to find.
The First Surprise: Most People Aren’t the Problem
The easiest story to tell about India’s institutional failures is a moral one. Corruption. Incompetence. Voters who choose the wrong politicians. Officials who don’t care.
The research tells a different story. It mostly tells a story about rational people responding to badly designed systems.
Consider politicians. India’s electoral cycle — state elections, national elections, local body elections — creates something close to a permanent campaign environment. In this environment, what gets funded is what’s visible. A new road, a subsidized gas cylinder, a direct cash transfer — these are legible to voters and attributable to a specific government. A better school, over a decade, is not.
So funding flows toward visibility. Social sector spending in the 2026–27 Union Budget: 2.5% of GDP, the second-lowest share in over a decade. Education: 2.5% of the Union Budget, down from nearly 4% in 2015–16. Health: 2% of total budgetary expenditure.
This isn’t because politicians don’t care about schools. It’s because the system doesn’t reward caring about schools in a way that’s electorally legible.
Or consider civil servants. The average IAS officer stays at a single posting for under 18 months before being transferred. In that time, they’re supposed to build local knowledge, relationships, and implementation capacity for complex programs. They also know they’ll be held accountable for procedural compliance rather than outcomes. The rational response is to process files correctly and avoid any discretionary decision that could come back as an audit finding.
The research on Block Development Officers — the frontline administrators who manage rural welfare — is striking. The average BDO has 24.5 full-time staff to manage thousands of villages. 44% spend personal money to do their jobs. They want to plan and manage. Instead they spend most of their time handling individual complaints because they don’t have staff to delegate routine tasks to.
The system is producing suboptimal outcomes not because the people in it are bad, but because the incentives point the wrong direction.
The Second Surprise: How Much the Problems Connect
When I started, I had a rough mental model that treated each domain as separate. The judicial system has one set of problems. Education has another. The economy has another.
The research doesn’t support this model.
Consider social trust. India has a generalized trust level of about 35% — meaning roughly a third of people agree that “most people can be trusted.” That’s lower than the Nordic countries (60%+) and higher than Brazil (under 10%), but the important number isn’t the absolute figure. It’s what low trust does.
When generalized trust is low, people can only do business with people they already know. Networks substitute for institutions. Firms stay small — not because they’re poorly managed, but because expanding beyond your trust network is genuinely risky when courts take 1,400 days to enforce a contract.
So low trust keeps firms informal and small. Small informal firms don’t pay much tax. Low tax revenue means inadequate investment in courts, schools, and hospitals. Bad courts make contract enforcement unreliable. Unreliable enforcement keeps trust low.
The loop is coherent. It’s not six separate problems. It’s one interconnected system producing consistent outputs.
This matters for reform strategy. Fixing one node without addressing the others produces partial improvement that often gets absorbed by the system without changing the underlying dynamics. Judicial reform without bureaucratic reform means better laws that are still poorly implemented. Education spending without accountability means more money going into a system that’s already spending more per student than comparable private schools and producing worse outcomes.
The Third Surprise: Some Things Work Remarkably Well
I went in expecting to write about failure. The research also required writing about success.
India’s digital public infrastructure is, by any honest measure, one of the most significant public policy achievements of the 21st century. UPI processed over 20 billion transactions in August 2025 alone. Aadhaar covers 97% of the population. The Account Aggregator framework is building consent-based data sharing infrastructure that regulators in Europe and the US are trying to understand.
Countries are asking India how to build this. The UAE adopted UPI interoperability. Singapore did the same. India is exporting digital infrastructure as a model.
The India Stack — the layered, open-API architecture that lets private companies build on public rails — was a deliberate design choice that could have gone differently. The government could have built proprietary systems that served government use cases only, as many countries did. Instead, it built something others could develop on. That’s why UPI became a platform with thousands of applications, not just one government app.
Separately, India’s competitive federalism — the fact that states compete for investment, talent, and migration — has driven genuine policy innovation. States that improved the business environment attracted more investment and built pressure on neighboring states. This mechanism works when information about relative performance is available.
The Supreme Court striking down the Electoral Bonds Scheme in early 2024 was a real institutional check on executive power. The court didn’t ask for permission. It acted on constitutional grounds.
These are not small things. A country that has built world-scale digital infrastructure, has a judiciary independent enough to rule against the incumbent government on a major financing question, and has states competitive enough to drive policy improvement on some dimensions — this is not a failed state. It’s a state with significant assets and significant dysfunctions operating simultaneously.
The Question I Kept Returning To
The research is grounded in a broader question I spent time on before starting: what type of societal system produces the most stable, ethical, and high-functioning outcomes?
The answer the evidence points to is not a specific ideology. The best-performing countries — Nordic nations, New Zealand, Estonia, Canada — don’t agree on the size of government or the degree of market intervention. What they share is something more structural: high-quality institutions, public trust, fair access to opportunity, and accountability mechanisms that actually work.
This combination is sometimes called “Ethical Market Democracy.” It’s an awkward phrase, but the concept is specific: economic freedom plus social protections plus rule of law plus distributed power. Not any one of these alone.
The Nordic countries aren’t successful because of culture or history or some irreplicable national character. They’re successful because they built certain kinds of systems over several decades — systems that reward cooperation, punish abuse, and invest in long-term human capital even when it’s not electorally visible.
Estonia transformed from a post-Soviet state with minimal institutional capacity to one of the most digitally sophisticated, least corrupt, and most efficiently administered countries in Europe. In roughly thirty years. Through deliberate institutional design choices.
The implication is that India’s situation isn’t determined by fate or culture or some permanent feature of democracy at scale. It’s determined by the institutional design choices that are either made deliberately or made by default.
What the Research Converged On
After twelve domains, the research pointed toward six high-leverage interventions that would improve outcomes across most other areas simultaneously.
Fill judicial vacancies and withdraw non-viable government litigation. Mandate a 2-year minimum posting tenure for civil servants. Build a National Outcomes Data System with public district-level publication. Transform early childhood development quality. Reform urban fiscal capacity. Guarantee foundational learning with teacher accountability.
None of these require constitutional amendment. None require a political consensus that doesn’t currently exist. Each can begin within a year.
What they share is a property that’s also their political liability: they’re invisible. Filling judicial vacancies doesn’t have a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Mandating posting tenure doesn’t generate footage for the evening news. Improving Anganwadi quality across 1.4 million centers doesn’t produce a press release.
This is why the political economy analysis is as important as the technical one. The right interventions are identifiable. The question is whether the political system can ever be made to reward them.
Why I’m Writing About This
I’m not a policymaker. I don’t work in government. My professional life is largely focused on building things in the private sector, thinking about markets and incentives and organizational design.
But I’ve found, over several years, that the questions that interest me most are the ones where systems produce outcomes that the people inside them didn’t intend and don’t want. Where smart people make rational choices that add up to irrational collective outcomes.
India’s institutional situation is one of the most interesting examples of this I’ve encountered. The scale is enormous. The stakes are enormous — 1.4 billion people, a demographic window, 40-year compounding implications. And the diagnosis, while complex, is actually not that mysterious. The constraints aren’t hidden.
What I’m not sure of — and want to be honest about — is whether this analysis is right. I tried to keep the research as unbiased and evidence-based as possible. But I approached it as an informed non-expert, not a specialist in any of these fields. The synthesis is mine. Its errors are also mine.
Over the next ten weeks, I’ll publish 20 pieces across LinkedIn, Medium, and this blog, working through what I found domain by domain. Some of it will be specific and technical. Some of it will be more personal. I’ll try throughout to be clear about where the evidence is strong and where I’m extrapolating.
The best case for writing about this at all is that the people who might benefit from this analysis — Indian citizens, professionals, policymakers, people who care about the country’s trajectory — don’t all have time to read 12 empirical research documents. If I can make the synthesis accessible without making it shallow, that seems worth doing.
The worst case is that I’ve gotten something important wrong and am now getting it wrong at greater length.
I’m reasonably confident it’s somewhere in between.
This is the opening essay of a 10-week series on India’s institutional systems. The research draws on 12 empirical domain studies. All subsequent pieces in the series are grounded in that research, with links where relevant.