Without a keeper, it’s just not development

State, Market, Society

If you have a little free time this weekend, walk over to the playground in your neighbourhood and watch the kids playing cricket. You’ll recognise the game by the bats, ball, wickets, etc., and occasionally even pads and gloves, but what they’re actually playing is different in many ways, too.

One thing you’ll notice is that teams don’t always have the same number of players. That’s life. Eleven kids come out to play a team sport, and one team is going to end up with more players than the other. That’s OK, because they usually adjust this among themselves, by having a strong player on one side, giving the other side an extra player.

Development is a little like that. There’s more than one way forward, and some nations pick one path, while others pick a different one. Some think they can trade their way to growth, others want a strong indigenous manufacturing economy, others are happy to play banker in the middle of the field of nations.

But there are still rules that matter, even within this variation. Now, look at those cricket teams again, the ones with unequal numbers of players. Despite the fact that one team might be a bowler or a batsman short, neither of those teams will be missing a wicketkeeper. That’s important. In both cricket and development, we could make up for a missing role or two with some other extraordinary talent, but there are some roles that no amount of talent can make up for.

Making up for a wicket-keeper is just too much to jugaad our way out of. When our team doesn’t have a stumper, we’re halfway to lost. The room for error is large, and the opposition can simply let a few balls go by, knowing that we don’t have a backstop. We spend a lot of energy fetching the ball from the ropes again and again, while what we need instead is to get a stopper. The most common thing happening on the scoreboard is ‘4 byes’, followed by edged boundaries, instead of ‘outs’ behind the wicket.

Back to governance and development. In that world, the ‘wicketkeeper’ is not a person, but instead, it’s the balance between the state, market and society. When all three act together to push agendas of development, nations make a lot of progress. Having all three players on the development field partners limit each other’s mistakes (like stopping wides in cricket), joint efforts for success (catches to be taken) and preparing pitches (fields set). In both arenas, without these, defeat is the likeliest outcome.

Most developing nations, if not all, have not yet got this balance right, and that’s the reason they still have a long way to go to catch up to others. Governments try to dominate society, telling citizens how to live and think. They are also in an awkward relationship with industry -- either extractive or collusive, and sometimes both!

This, more or less, puts development goals out of reach. Without a balance of participation between state, market and society, nations end up predictably doing wrong things. They try to fix the umpire, killing off the independence of statutory institutions; they try to rig the score-card, putting out fake data about the true state of the nation; they try player substitutions at odd times, as political alliances form and unravel unexpectedly.

To the field again, to wrap up. Occasionally, a game will start without a wicketkeeper, but after a few deliveries, it quickly become obvious that in the interest of winning (and time!) that just won’t do. And someone from the audience, or even the opposite team, will step in to keep wickets, or at stop balls from running away repeatedly. That’s our cue to development too. We can watch from the sidelines as governments struggle to do things that cannot be achieved without the participation of society and markets, or we can also begin to play a part.

In the aftermath of 1947, we fell quickly into a state-led rhythm, accepting that the challenges of economy and society must be solved by the Sarkar. Even when others came to power in governments, they found it convenient to maintain this imbalance. That has led us to a situation where the largest concentration of poor people in the history of the planet now live in our country, enduring lives of avoidable suffering. There’s only one way to fix it.

To keep wickets, or to lose them? That is the question. The balance between state, market and society, and the breadth of capabilities it brings to the development arena, contains within it our best hope for progress. It’s always been true; what’s left is for us to believe it. In the first few pieces of this column, I have suggested plainly that this is necessary. In the coming weeks, we’ll explore how this is possible.