Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
What lies ahead for India’s politics and economics in a fast-changing world?
In A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey, economist Arvind Subramanian and political scientist Devesh Kapur provide a comprehensive view of India’s efforts to recast a nation, a state, a society, and an economy all at once in the eight decades since its independence. They explore the interactions of ideologies and interest groups in a “precocious democracy” and the resulting economic outcomes, analyzing the paths taken (and not) in the context both of India’s own history and in a comparative framework. The patterns they unearth in their groundbreaking work will in turn shape the prospects of the planet’s most populous country in a world marked by increasing geopolitical, economic, and technological uncertainty.
Karthik Sankaran, senior research fellow in geoeconomics in the Global South program at the Quincy Institute, spoke with the two authors.
What lies ahead for India’s politics and economics in a fast-changing world?
In A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey, economist Arvind Subramanian and political scientist Devesh Kapur provide a comprehensive view of India’s efforts to recast a nation, a state, a society, and an economy all at once in the eight decades since its independence. They explore the interactions of ideologies and interest groups in a “precocious democracy” and the resulting economic outcomes, analyzing the paths taken (and not) in the context both of India’s own history and in a comparative framework. The patterns they unearth in their groundbreaking work will in turn shape the prospects of the planet’s most populous country in a world marked by increasing geopolitical, economic, and technological uncertainty.
Karthik Sankaran, senior research fellow in geoeconomics in the Global South program at the Quincy Institute, spoke with the two authors.
