India needs a new constitution!?

Nobel prize winning institutional economist Douglass North observed that “economic history is overwhelmingly a story of economies that failed to produce a set of economic rules of the game (with enforcement) that induce sustained economic growth.” For more than a century, India was under comprehensive exploitative and extractive colonial British rule. It was not primarily directed towards development of india, but rather towards extraction. The legacies continued as argued in a recent write-up by Atanu Dey and Rajesh Jain and reflected in the making of constitution of India.

They argued that the comprehensive government control of the economy through administration and control was left intact when the British decided to leave India, and was taken over by the government of Independent India.

"Although India attained political independence from the British raj, Indians did not become free of a controlling—and extractive—government." 

They concluded that India’s problem is structural and systemic, and not idiosyncratic. If the constitution were to change, the ultimate rules of the game would change, the policies (the derived rules) will change, and thus the action on the ground (the play of the game) will change, and therefore the outcome will change. 

"India needs a new constitution that is consistent with a nation of free individuals living in a complex, modern, large economy. This modern constitution has to be one that guarantees economic freedom to the individual, prohibits the government from making any laws that discriminate among citizens, guarantees freedom of speech and the press, prohibits the government from entering into businesses that are properly the domain of the private sector, and so on. In other words, India needs a constitution that protects the comprehensive freedom of the individual: economic, social and political."

However, in the last two decades, economically, India has broken out of the paradigm of low growth. And, the new growth is producing far-reaching changes in income, occupational structures, lifestyles and aspirations. Politically, India’s democracy has deepened, giving hitherto marginalised groups impressive representation and recognition. Administratively, the state has acquired unprecedented resources to spend on programs ostensibly designed for inclusion. And there is a palpable change in social consciousness: political democracy has induced a sense of agency and empowerment across different groups in society; today inclusion is a demand of citizens, not a gift given from on high. Certainly, the pace is slow, but steady, being big and nimble enough. So talking about the new rules of the game in the pluralist India is too much to ask!