A Sixth of Humanity and the Dreams of a Nation

A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India's Development Odyssey is a landmark new book by the scholars Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian. The book is an audacious attempt to trace how India uniquely and daringly attempted four concurrent transformations—building a state, creating an economy, changing society, and forging a sense of nationhood under conditions of universal suffrage. It is the joint product of one of India’s most respected political scientists and one of its best-known economists. The book includes insights from politics, economics, history, and literature and provides a developmental history of India that is big, bold, engaging, and utterly unique. To talk more about their book and the lessons it holds for India’s next 75 years, Arvind and Devesh return to Grand Tamasha to speak with Milan.

Devesh Kapur is the Starr Foundation Professor of South Asia Studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Arvind Subramanian is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC. He previously served as the former chief economic adviser to the government of India. The trio discuss the vision for the book, India’s checkered history of upholding the rule of law, and what we get wrong about India’s tryst with central planning. Plus, they discuss India’s stellar record as an export powerhouse, the long shadow of vested interests, the pressures on India’s model of fiscal federalism, and ongoing challenges with nation-building. Episode notes:1.

Arvind Subramanian, “Can India reverse its manufacturing failure?” Financial Times, November 10, 2024.

2. Josh Felman and Arvind Subramanian, “Is India Really the Next China?” Foreign Policy, April 8, 2024.

3. “The Future of India's Fiscal Federalism (with Arvind Subramanian),” Grand Tamasha, October 16, 2024.

4. Amit Ahuja and Devesh Kapur, eds., Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).

5. “Opening the Black Box of India’s Internal Security State (with Amit Ahuja and Devesh Kapur),” Grand Tamasha, May 10, 2023.

6. Devesh Kapur, “Why Does the Indian State Both Fail and Succeed?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 34, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 31-54.

7. Rohit Lamba and Arvind Subramanian, “Dynamism with Incommensurate Development: The Distinctive Indian Model,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 34, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 3-30.

8. Yamini Aiyar, “New GST regime: A grand bargain reduced to imperfect compromise,” Hindustan Times, October 7, 2025.

9. “A Blueprint for India’s State Capacity Revolution (with Karthik Muralidharan),” Grand Tamasha, May 23, 2024.