IMAGINING INDIA: IDEAS FOR THE NEW CENTURY By Nandan Nilekani, Penguin, Rs 699

Nandan Nilekani is famous. Penguin has exhibited him in shows to promote his book in major cities; television channels, newspapers and magazines have made headlines out of him. So I will discuss his book rather than him.

Written in a light, conversational style, this book is best looked upon as a layman’s introduction to India’s major policy problems. It is about what is wrong with India and how to put it right. It is born out of Nilekani’s background and circumstances. Living in India, he experiences the frustrations we all share. He is interested in ideas. He meets many important and interesting people, including intellectuals. He makes good friends amongst them. He picks their brains and reads their books. That is how he has arrived at the diagnosis embodied in this book.

The diagnosis inevitably leans a good deal on history, which gets a racy coverage. I found it somewhat half baked. The two principal culprits are the British and Nehru; Gandhi does not fare better, but he died too early to bear much blame. What happens in history is the result of interplay between what people feel and want, and impersonal forces — economic, political, and social. Nilekani underplays these forces. His history is therefore simplified to the point of inaccuracy. For example, Nilekani is unaware how small the government was under the British, and how small its economic influence was for good or bad. It could be argued that the reason why they lost India was that they failed to develop it — although development policy would have gone against their ideology of laissez faire. He shows no understanding of the circumstances when India became independent — the inflation, the structure of the economy, the loss of West Punjab’s wheat surpluses — to which Nehruvian policies were a reaction, however mistaken. Similarly, Indira Gandhi had to deal with food shortage, cessation of US aid, and the oil crisis. Whatever one’s view of her, it remains incomplete without an understanding of the context.

Nilekani is best when he comes to our problems or “challenges”. His negative opinion of states in our government is entirely justified. They have actively worked to destroy the free trade area that India should be. They have starved growing cities of resources and deprived them of the autonomy they need to become viable places of work and life. Above all, they collect considerable resources and spend them on government consumption, of which corruption — transfer of resources from governments’ into politicians’ and bureaucrats’ hands — is the major component. Nilekani relates the ills arising from the government dominance of education, health, power and infrastructure. This is familiar ground, but well worth traversing once more.

However, challenges are only one part of this book; it also bristles with solutions. Many of them come from the non-profit, non-government organizations. Nilekani collects interesting NGOs as others collect stamps; his recounting of their achievements and experiences is what I found most illuminating. It is sobering that although India is a land of a million blooming NGOs, they have so little influence on or in the country. What prevents their replication, their mass production? I suspect that it is their nonprofitability that makes them unsustainable. But this is a question that Nilekani is well qualified to answer as an entrepreneur; I hope he will give it more thought in the next edition.

Nilekani is a gregarious man, and knows many intellectuals. His collection of ideas out of conversations with them brings a certain freshness to the book. They suddenly pop up in a hill station, in his favourite restaurant, or in his house; the book is replete with quotations from them. What makes the book so readable is Nilekani’s anecdotes. For instance, to explain social insurance, Martin Feldstein relates the story of a man who jumps from a building. Halfway down, someone in a window asks him how he is doing. “So far, I am fine,” he replies.

This is a different way of writing a book from the usual scholarly grind, where people laboriously read literature, work out for themselves what has been said and what has not, what makes sense and what does not, and then come to a position of their own. It is more about choosing the big questions, asking the best people how they would solve them, seasoning their views with common sense and serving the dish hot and spicy. The result is tasty. What this cherry-picking lacks is rigour. The book bristles with ideas, but there is little discussion of their relative merits or elimination of bad ideas. Specialists in the fields Nilekani surveys at breakneck speed will pick holes in them. But people with less time will find this book a good guide to our major public concerns.