Minister Milinda Moragoda opened the discussion with some thought provoking questions about China.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta (Center For Policy Research, India): The quick reaction I had was it’s precisely these kinds of questions that make the best case for evidence based policy making. I would contest most of these dichotomies. There are interesting contrasts, but I think his diagnosis is a bit misapplied. On this question of infrastructure and roads, but I think the character of this debate will be very different five years from now.

One this we have not factored is the way in which growth transforms the potential government has to make an impact on society. If you look at state government budgets in India between 95 and 2000, they were more or less constant. It’s only when you have growth in government revenues that politics starts to get exciting. India is at that tipping point where you will begin to see the curve of democracy.

You’ll see the politics of caste, religion giving away to a more robust political accountability. India did start 20 years behind China. China did have the advantage of a revolution. What revolutions do is destroy old regimes and create new possibilities. Democracies are inherently conservative, no democracy has been able to successfully institute land reform.

India will have to live with an ameliorative political structure rather than a revolutionary one.

On Evidence Based Policy Making

The hard part in a democratic system is does everyone share this information, do they value what’s at stake in the same hierarchy of values. Both these aggregation and alignment problems are serious. I think that experiments in local government are trying to address these tricky problems.

Milinda: as a politician you can always explain the long term, but what do you tell the guy who says I want to get my kid into school next term. If you give a lecture on reform you’re not going to get through the next election. How do you manage the short term. Prof Xue Lan, what is your reaction to the systems we have here?

Xue Lan: Different democracies have different starting points. I think the two key elements are the election of leaders and the elaboration of policy. You can have the election of leaders without a policy process that is not conducive. I think that from what I see, it’s the organizations that can play a very constructive role in the deliberation of public policy.

Milinda: In the long term, which is going to work?

Mehta: I do believe that political systems have to be embedded in political and social realities from which they emerge. In that sense, one of the interesting things about our era is that we have two large societies emerging. For a while it looked like one would gallop away. However, the real issue may not be the formal character of power, but the structure of the state. The two things South Asia has done wrong is the way its state structures are defined. Unless a state has clarity about what function should be performed at what level, it will have problems.

The second issue is, by and large engineers and scientists play very little role in Indian policy making. Our civil service is a very odd creature. Its identity is defined by formal processes, not substantive rationality (outcomes, how do I get it). The ability to embed the right mix of knowledge in government has been impaired by the structures of government.

We are dominated by economists and civil servants.

Milinda: When businessmen get in the same room they speak the same language. When politicians gather they speak the same language. My personal view is that there is a cultural context.