Who a nation ultimately trusts determines where its loyalties truly lie. Who should India trust? Its governments? Its armed forces? Its gods? After years of work on improving the ease of doing business, a growing body of research urging an extension of the 1991 reforms, and two rounds of decriminalisation, the motto, ‘Jan Vishwas’, suggested an answer: India should trust its citizens. A year after the 2025 Economic Survey signalled the acceleration of deregulation efforts, this year’s Survey has reviewed the progress made at the state level and announced a second phase covering five priority areas: land use, building and construction, labour, utilities and permission, and other overarching priorities. The recent Union budget has less to say about deregulation, declaring commitments to human development and equity alongside growth in pursuing “Reform Express”. We would do well to pay close attention to these policy developments as much to receive the trust being reposed in us as to shape what it means.
A predominant framing for ‘trust-based governance’ emphasises deregulation as a means to get the government out of the way of economic growth. This familiar trope has a significance in the Indian context that is difficult to ignore: far too many of our businesses remain small and informal because of a regulatory regime that comes down heavily on players just as they dare to grow or formalise. Enterprises shy away from scaling up beyond thresholds that seem to correspond with unreasonable legal bottlenecks. And without scale, productivity is throttled. The irrepressibility of timely innovation is, in this suffocating climate, repressed.
The flip side is that we do not set our governments up for success. We spread them too thin instead of pushing them to prioritise effective public service delivery and regulation. Without reconciling our aspirations with the genuine limits of State capacity, our laws set targets that are too lofty for our current means. Key pillars like public education and urban development languish. The promises of local government, administrative reform, and dynamic regulatory authorities remain unfulfilled. The State empowers itself but not its citizens.
This last suggests a third dimension to consider: perhaps trusting citizens with more requires trusting governments with less? Many official duties can seem like they were designed to be discharged in unconsidered, oppressive, or even opportunistic ways. But these powers flourish because we have failed to fix responsibility where it more naturally belongs. It is easy to forget how ubiquitous this dimension of trust is. The Constituent Assembly produced a detailed Constitution with a Central bias because it trusted itself more than future governments. Successive Union governments have shown little faith in state and local-level democracy. Our executive branches cannot trust legislators to not defect for personal benefit. Faced with opportunistic governance and politics, courts abandon discipline in favour of case-by-case solutions. The problem is especially serious when we see how easily public power transforms into unchecked discretion. There is a through line here from politics to the practical impact of licensing and inspections regimes: domination is preferred to regulation.
The three dimensions of trust outlined above correspond to three kinds of freedom: freedom from interference (negative freedom); freedom to choose from a rich menu of options (positive freedom); and freedom from arbitrary will (republican freedom). We often hear about the first two of these, so it helps to paint a more vivid picture of the third. In a hierarchical society, freedoms depend on the whims of another. Just as a horse may be given free rein only for this ‘freedom’ to be withdrawn by its rider at will, a servant, child, wife, subordinate, or subject may owe their days off, pocket money, time away from home, career opportunities, or their very life to the personal preferences of their master, parent, husband, superior, or monarch. It is in this light that economic freedoms were first espoused in Europe: as a remedy to the interlocking feudal hierarchies of lord-tenant, master-servant, craftsman-apprentice, bishop-priest, church-parishioner, guild-merchant, and household relationships. It is worth asking what norms emerged historically elsewhere alongside economic freedoms if we are to more fully understand why India may have many of the hierarchies it still does. Could it be that in neglecting our markets, we also preserved fragments of indigenous feudalisms?
But this very understanding also offers a precious form of clarity that pre-industrial advocates of free trade never had. Freedom from domination was prized because it could secure a future of masterless, self-employed individuals, and the monopolies of Church and Crown were challenged in the name of equality. But the onset of the Industrial Revolution made that future impossible. Today, both the history of that transformative period and prophecies about tomorrow’s forms of economic organisation together allow us to see how even private entities can come to dominate large swathes of our life choices, fashioning business models of hierarchy, rent, subscription, and precarity for consumers and employees, efficiencies of scale that distance power from those subject to it, and technologies that leave individuals manipulable while themselves remaining unaccountable even to the market.
It matters little for a woman whether she has the right to divorce if, in each marriage, her husband’s authority is absolute. Consumers and employees in a free market are no different. As the political philosopher, Elizabeth Anderson, puts it in her book, Private Government, “Consent to an option within a set cannot justify the option set itself.” If we choose to prioritise growth today, it will be because we have never quite given economic freedom the credit it deserves. But if we are to avoid a future in which we merely jump from one (antiquated) form of feudalism to another (advanced) one, we would do well to plan for freedom, attend to the sets of options made available, and pay attention to how well our champions bear the responsibilities that trust entails. Trust, yes, but never blind trust.
Lalit Panda is a Specialist (Rights and Regulation) at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. Views are personal
