Writings

Pride is more that a march

PRATEEK RAJ June 2025, LinkedIn

Politics of hate does not distinguish between “unskilled” and “skilled” people, or between queer and non queer people. It may start with the most vulnerable group, but it always gets to everyone. And this is why, if people think Pride Month has nothing to do with them, they must think again.

During the 2024 US election, the Trump campaign spent over $215 million on ads targeting transgender people - people who make up less than one percent of the population, and are among the most marginalized and vulnerable. For the other 99 percent, life carried on. These ads fueled Trump’s return.

Now that Trump is back in office, it’s not only queer people who are under siege. Over the few month, the administration announced visa restrictions on foreign students - not limited to any single region or nationality, but applied indiscriminately.

And the crackdown hasn’t stopped at immigrants. American scientists at some of the nation’s leading universities have lost access to federal funding - for pursuing research that supports so-called “woke” concepts: climate change, gender diversity, racial inequality.

From Muslims to Mexicans to trans people and now students, scholars, scientists, and even universities Trump’s ambit of reckless restrictions has come a long way. It does not surprise me at all, as this is the nature of hate. Now, many - including those who don’t live in the US - are beginning to self-censor out of fear of being denied entry if they ever wish to visit.

Social media vetting, recently announced as part of the administration’s visa policy overhaul, is sending a chilling message to foreign students, scholars, and workers: they are being told to accept a second class status. And this is why I thought I should post this.

Targeting groups like trans and queer people is always just a starting point. Pandering politicians know these groups will face the least resistance from a society numbed by apathy.

In Pride Month, we must remember: Pride is not merely a parade or a party. It is a protest. A mirror. A warning. A demand. That in a free country, people are free to be different, and not fit in. If you’re someone who believes Pride has nothing to do with you—think again. Those “atypical weirdos” you scroll past on your feed? They are the canaries in the coal mine. When their voices are silenced, yours may be next. 🌈

Industrial towns of India and the Indian dream

PRATEEK RAJ March 2025, LinkedIn

Jamshedpur, and all other industrial towns that followed - like Bokaro and Bhilai, have been such good models of social mobility in India. Employees would come with their families to these remote towns from all around India - and these towns would provide them not only a place to work, but also an environment to raise well-rounded families.

Children of these employees (I am an example) received some of the best education, and went on to chart their own way. In my book, I use Jamshedpur as an example of what holistic strategic stewardship looks like, and I genuinely think Jamshedpur and other such industrial towns represented the Indian dream of a regular citizen who only had their human capital to grow and succeed - a good, dignified place to work and live.

But over the last few decades, instead of building up on this Indian dream, we have systematically ignored India’s many Jamshedpurs, as we have obsessed over pursuing a very parochial form of economic growth concentrated in a few cities. In a city like Jamshedpur, organizations like Tatas are not just businesses, they are institutions and community builders. But thanks to a particular mindset of business and management, today’s management philosophy is all about treating business like a “dhandha” (profiteering organization) and nothing more.

Our parochial view has caused us to create organizations where managers think paying a salary to their employees is enough to buy their loyalty, and that it is none of the business of the organization to think about the welfare of their employees and their families. There exists little sense of community in India’s private organizations, which is sad because once India pioneered the very idea of stewardship around the world, thanks to organizations like the Tatas.

People in India are waking up to the fact that India’s development has come at a cost of deteriorating quality of life (pollution, water scarcity, unaffordable schooling, poor roads, urban sprawl). We need to realize that the peculiar form of capitalism we are championing, where every organization is just another “dhandha” and employees and communities are dispensable, is the cause of our deteriorating quality of life.

You cannot build a country by taking communities out of it. But that is what we are trying to do, and in the process, forgetting our own legacy of industrial towns, where a healthy mix of business and community orientation created places where everyone could dream of a good life.

Creating a town that offered a good life had several critics. On this Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata, the director of Tata Steel, said in 1923, 'We are constantly accused by people of wasting money in the town of Jamshedpur. We are asked why it should be necessary to spend so much on housing, sanitation, roads, hospitals and on welfare ... Gentlemen, people who ask these questions are sadly lacking in imagination. We are not putting up a row of workmen's huts in Jamshedpur - we are building a city”

(Read more about industrial towns and the vision of multi-stakeholderism in Atypical)

The Mandala Economy

The Kumbh Mela is more than a spiritual event; it is a sophisticated economic organism that demonstrates how large-scale gatherings can be efficiently managed and offers valuable lessons for urban management

PRATEEK RAJ 1 October 2024, Outlook India

Kumbh Mela is the largest human gathering in the world. While much is spoken about its cultural and spiritual significance, Kumbh is equally fascinating as a study in spontaneous economic systems. Kumbh occurs every few years at four rotating locations in India—Allahabad (Prayagraj), Haridwar, Ujjain and Nashik, with the 2019 Prayagraj Kumbh attracting a record 24 crore visitors. The scale of Kumbh, especially in modern times, offers a unique insight into the economics of large-scale, transient gatherings. On a peak day with 3 crore visitors, the Kumbh economy can rival the size of cities like Delhi or Mumbai.

Temporary megacities are created to accommodate crores of visitors, only to disappear after the event concludes, mirroring the creation and dissolution of a mandala—a sacred circle in Hindu and Buddhist traditions symbolising the universe’s impermanence. At Kumbh, as in a mandala, everything appears, serves its purpose and then disappears, relying on an intricate network of stakeholders, each playing a unique role in maintaining this temporary economy.

Kumbh’s stakeholders include government bodies, police and security forces, religious organisations, pilgrims and private businesses. Together, they contribute to the transient economy that emerges during the mela.

The government plays a crucial role in planning, coordination and maintaining public infrastructure. Central and state governments, alongside local municipalities, collaborate to provide essential services such as sanitation, crowd control, public safety, transportation, and healthcare. This requires a massive logistical effort, especially during peak days when crowds swell to nearly 3 crore visitors. While government bodies are heavily involved, private businesses form the backbone of the Kumbh economy, offering essential services. Private tents for accommodation, eateries serving a wide variety of meals, transport services and vendors selling memorabilia, religious books, and daily essentials are omnipresent during the mela. 

These private businesses range from large, formal enterprises operating through government contracts to informal, uncontracted vendors who spontaneously set up stalls. These informal vendors play a crucial role in filling the gaps left by formal stakeholders, catering to niche demands that larger companies may not be able to anticipate or quickly address. Informal vendors also create job opportunities for locals, who come from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Their agility allows them to meet the immediate needs of visitors, contributing to a spontaneous yet efficient ecosystem.

The goods and services offered at Kumbh span a full spectrum. Some of the primary economic activities include:

• Accommodation Services: From luxurious tents set up by formal companies to makeshift huts offered by smaller vendors, accommodation at the mela caters to all economic strata. Temporary tent cities spring up to accommodate lakhs, with some pandals as big as for 20,000 pilgrims, with thousands others with amenities like wi-fi, hot water and other “luxury” facilities for affluent pilgrims.

• Food and Eateries: Food is a significant part of the economy, with businesses and local vendors setting up makeshift restaurants, food stalls and tea shops. The variety of meals ranges from simple vegetarian dishes to elaborate offerings for wealthier visitors.

• Transport: Transport services within and around the Kumbh grounds become a thriving business. Auto-rickshaws, cycle rickshaws and private taxis help visitors navigate the sprawling site. Meanwhile, railways and airlines make special arrangements to meet the massive demand for long-distance travel.

• Memorabilia and Religious Items: Vendors selling religious items like prayer beads, statues, holy water containers and spiritual texts are found throughout the mela. These items not only cater to the pilgrims’ spiritual needs but also contribute to the local economy.

• Books and Cultural Merchandise: The demand for spiritual literature, including holy books and commentaries, sees a significant rise. Vendors specialising in religious texts help disseminate spiritual knowledge, adding an educational layer to the Kumbh economy.

Religious institutions, such as akhadas and ashrams, also play an important role in the Kumbh economy, offering accommodation, food and other services to devotees. Many of these institutions feature awe-inspiring installations that attract additional visitors.

Adaptive Governance: Many Kumbh Melas in One

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Kumbh mela economy is its ability to adapt to fluctuating crowd levels. On regular days during the 2019 Prayagraj Kumbh, 10–20 lakh visitors participated, allowing for decentralised and relaxed governance. Informal vendors and smaller businesses thrived during these periods with lower regulation, providing personalised and spontaneous services.

In contrast, on peak days when nearly 3 crore visitors arrived, a more centralised and controlled governance structure was required. Business boomed, but regulations tightened. Police and security forces took centre stage, as managing crowds safely and stampede prevention became the top priority.

Kumbh’s governance would be incomplete without its robust public information and monitoring system. Extensive communication networks enable authorities to manage crowd control, broadcast emergency updates and help reunite missing persons with their families. This information infrastructure ensures vendors and businesses can operate efficiently, even during peak crowd surges. One of the system’s remarkable achievements is the coordination of emergency services, ensuring swift responses to medical needs despite overwhelming crowds.

Another critical component of the Kumbh economy is the role of external consultants, often brought in to assist with complex areas like IT implementation, infrastructure management and contingency planning. These consultants work closely with the government to ensure that various stakeholders—from sanitation workers to tent vendors—are effectively managed, particularly during peak times. They contribute to the agility of the administration, stepping in as needed based on the event’s evolving demands.

Sanitation services, although often overlooked, are essential to the Kumbh economy. While the government sets up nearly tens of thousands of toilets and sanitation facilities, they become overcrowded, especially on peak days. Short-term contracted sanitation workers play an indispensable role in maintaining cleanliness, sometimes cleaning every 10 seconds in high-demand areas. Sanitation workers dedication prevents the Kumbh economy from collapsing under the sheer volume of participants. To boost morale, special events, such as Guinness World Records attempts, are organised during non-peak days.

An overlooked aspect of Kumbh’s success is the fluidity of stakeholder roles. While role ambiguity is often seen as a liability in management literature, it is a unique strength at Kumbh. With loosely defined roles, vendors, administrators and workers can step in to perform tasks outside their formal duties, ensuring agility and flexibility. The Kumbh mela, with its ever-shifting governance and complex web of stakeholders, offers a unique model for how large-scale gatherings can function with limited permanent infrastructure. Its economy operates with a beautiful spontaneity, where formal and informal sectors work in tandem to cater to crores of visitors.

Kumbh raises an important question: What lessons can Indian cities learn from this sophisticated example of temporary urbanism? Here are several valuable insights for urban planners and policymakers:

• Clear Accountability: The Kumbh mela follows the Mela Pradhikari model, where a designated leader was empowered and held fully accountable, similar to a CEO. Indian cities could benefit from empowering mayors with similar authority to streamline urban governance and drive long-term development, as seen in many cities worldwide.

• Mission-Based Approach: Kumbh mela’s mission—safety, cleanliness and sanitation—help align stakeholders toward clear, focused goals. Indian cities could adopt this approach by setting specific, time-bound objectives for infrastructure improvements, public services and amenities. A well-defined mission would offer a clear roadmap for development, ensuring coordinated efforts.

• Focused Attention: Kumbh’s success is partly due to intense media scrutiny, creating strong incentives for stakeholders to perform. Indian cities could benefit from consistent media coverage of local issues, ensuring timely action, transparency and accountability in governance.

• Multi-Stakeholder Governance: Kumbh’s governance involves multiple stakeholders, fostering collaboration. Indian cities could replicate this model by integrating universities, businesses and communities into core development initiatives. For instance, universities can contribute through start-up hubs and apprenticeship centres, creating a collaborative ecosystem that accelerates urban growth and innovation.

Kumbh mela is more than a spiritual event; it is a sophisticated economic organism that demonstrates how large-scale gatherings can be efficiently managed. Its blend of accountability, mission-driven focus and multi-stakeholder involvement offers valuable lessons for urban management. It is no surprise that institutions like Harvard and IIM Bangalore have studied this real-life mandala as a model for temporary urbanism and economic coordination. Indian cities could apply these insights to create more responsive, adaptive and efficient urban systems.

A blueprint for creating good jobs in India

To create good, stable jobs, we must focus on inclusive growth that creates jobs by investing in the social sector, revitalising labour-intensive industries, and prioritising extensive skill development

PRATEEK RAJ 2 June 2024, Forbes India

India's current growth model has often been called a success, as evident in its stock market performance and strong investor confidence. However, beneath the surface has been a critical issue that threatens the stability and inclusiveness of our economy: the lack of good, stable jobs. This issue is evident in the placement data from premier institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), where many graduates struggle to find employment that matches their skills and aspirations. Additionally, the International Labour Organization's (ILO) recent report highlights that between 2012 and 2019, employment in India grew by a mere 0.01 percent annually, with most new jobs being low-productivity roles in agriculture and construction.

The recent Indian elections have also pointed towards silent discontent about the state of economic affairs in the country, as many young and marginalised voices, especially in states like Uttar Pradesh, demanded job opportunities. For the new government, creating jobs must be the first priority. To create new and good jobs, the new government must reevaluate our current economic model, which prioritises capital over labour and has ignored essential social sectors.

An Economic Model that Forgets Workers

India's economic policies have heavily leaned towards capital-intensive growth. While this has spurred advancements in technology and productivity, it has done little to generate stable employment. The emphasis on automation and ICT platforms has created a plethora of gig jobs but has failed to establish a robust engine for long-term employment. The startup ecosystem, while celebrated for its innovation, often serves the interests of venture capitalists rather than generating substantial, stable jobs for the local workforce. We still await our second IT Revolution, like the first one in the 2000s.

This capital-intensive growth model has ignored the role of workers in building a strong economy. A strong economy needs trained workers with conducive working environments and decent living conditions to thrive and contribute meaningfully.

Neglect of the Social Sector and Public Goods

Another critical flaw in our growth strategy is the perennial underinvestment in the social sector and public goods. Essential services like education, healthcare, and public transport are being underfunded or handed over to private entities, making them inaccessible to a significant portion of the population. This neglect not only hampers human capital development but also fails to create the millions of stable jobs the social sector offers.

The low public investment in social services has resulted in poorly funded universities and hospitals that struggle to hire adequate staff. This lack of funding and resources leads to a vicious cycle of poor-quality services and limited job creation. We can't afford to ignore our social sector.

Creating Jobs: The Four Sectors

To address the job crisis, we need to focus on four key sectors that have the potential to create stable and meaningful employment:

1. The Social Sector: India urgently needs to invest in public health, education, and other social services. With over 7 lakh villages and 3 lakh urban communities requiring high-quality social services, this sector alone can generate millions of jobs. Strengthening public-private partnerships and ensuring fair wages for essential workers like Anganwadi and ASHA can significantly boost employment while improving the quality of life.

2. The Services Sector: As highlighted by economists Rohit Lamba and Raghuram Rajan, India's skilled, educated youth have immense potential to offer high-value services globally. However, there is a pressing need to update our educational curricula and invest in extensive skill development programs. This involves creating systems of apprenticeship and tertiary education upgradation to prepare young people for the rapidly changing job market.

3. The Labour-Intensive Sectors: Revitalising labour-intensive industries is essential for sustainable job creation. The manufacturing and agriculture sectors provide a foundation for a stable job base. Incentivising sectors like automobile and aerospace, as well as food processing, can generate millions of jobs due to the high value of their products. An urgent upskilling program is necessary to equip workers with the skills required for these industries.

4. The Skilling Mission: Central to job creation is a robust skilling mission that hires skilled scientists, teachers, and trainers across various levels of expertise. This initiative can create tens of thousands of stable jobs, laying a new foundation for skilling in India and ensuring the workforce is prepared for future challenges.

Conclusion

India's current growth model, heavily focused on capital at the expense of labour and social sectors, is unsustainable. To create good, stable jobs, we must focus on inclusive growth that creates jobs by investing in the social sector, revitalising labour-intensive industries, and prioritising extensive skill development. This holistic approach will not only address the immediate job crisis but also lay the groundwork for a more equitable and sustainable economic future. By rethinking our growth model, we can ensure that India's economic progress benefits all its citizens, creating a vibrant and resilient economy.

An appeal to India’s HR professionals

PRATEEK RAJ 30 June 2024, Open letter

30 June 2024

Dear HR professions of India,

As Pride Month ends, I feel a strange sense of loss. For one month, people are more receptive to queer lives, but tomorrow, things will return to “normal.” Queer people will be told to wait. “It was just in 2018 that being gay was decriminalized. How quickly do you want things to change? Have some patience.”

It’s easy to be patient when your investment in an issue is moral, intellectual, or ideological. For those not directly affected, progress over two decades sounds reasonable. Decriminalization in 2018, marriage rights in 2038. But human lives are measured in years, not decades. A 30-year-old queer person will be 50 in two decades. To wait that long feels like a betrayal.

For everyone else, marriage equality is an “issue” for debate. For queer folks, it’s about their lives and future: retirement, living arrangements, support systems. These are central questions any human has the right to decide on. Denying queer people and their partnerships recognition is dehumanizing. It strips away their agency over their own lives.

In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that granting marriage equality is the parliament’s jurisdiction, not the judiciary's. But the court recognized the right of queer people to live in same-sex partnerships and the need to recognize such partnerships to prevent discrimination.

I am uncertain about how much the government prioritizes the rights of a small segment of the population. But there is no justification for private institutions to do nothing. It is the responsibility of private institutions to treat your queer employees equally, and offer them same benefits. Otherwise, the 2023 SC judgement itself can form the basis of queer employees seeking legal action.

So, here is my appeal to HR professionals in India:

1. How does your organization address the issues of queer professionals?

2. Does it recognize their partners?

3. Does it extend medical support to their direct families?

Or do these benefits only apply to a “spouse”?

As HR professionals you must address these issues. Use the next few months to develop a plan, learning from practices already underway in Indian companies like Godrej, Axis Bank, P&G and HUL. Extending the definition of a partner may be a small policy change for you, but it can offer immense relief to a group treated with legally sanctioned prejudice until 2018 and beyond. Maybe in June 2025, you can truly feel proud to have positively affected lives of so many with your initiatives.

Some of your best employees are queer. If they excel despite prejudice and institutional constraints, imagine what they could achieve if they were truly free.

Regards,

Prateek Raj

Indian democracy needs a reinvigorated civil society

We must involve our youth in volunteering and socially conscious work and value those youngsters with genuine civic engagement backgrounds.

PRATEEK RAJ 8 June 2024, South First

India is a truly unique democracy. It is the only decolonized country with a sustained democracy since its independence among the 39 nations that became free between 1945 (the end of the Second World War) and 1960 (the end of the decolonization wave). Most countries that gained independence after the Second World War quickly collapsed into autocratic or military regimes (like Pakistan and North Korea), while a few, like Sri Lanka, began as democracies but faced significant periods of widespread conflict and backsliding. Some nations like Cyprus, Indonesia, Senegal, and South Korea eventually became democratic, while the democratic credentials of Israel, amidst its recurrent conflict with Palestine, remain severely contested.

India gave universal franchise to all its adult citizens from the very beginning, and elections remained largely free and fair in most parts throughout its history. In the 1940s and 50s, giving voting rights to hundreds of millions of people was a revolutionary and unprecedented move. To gauge how radical the idea of a universal adult franchise was, it is worth remembering that the world’s “oldest” democracy, the United States, extended the right to vote to people of colour only in the 1960s. Even more notably, the non-violent mass mobilization by a Gandhian, Martin Luther King, led to this universal right to vote in the United States. The Republic of India, with all its religious, lingual, and ethnic diversity, was truly a global pioneer in building the world’s first true multicultural democracy. We, as Indians, must be truly proud of our democratic heritage.

India is a constitutional democracy, which pioneered the concept of an irrevocable “basic structure” of the Constitution. This implies that Indian citizens are enshrined with irrevocable fundamental rights of liberty and equal treatment, which the whims and fancies of a populist majority or ideological elites cannot take away. There exists a strong separation of power between the executive, legislature and judiciary, with each arm of the government having checks and balances over the actions of the other.

Civil society

But at the heart of Indian democracy is a strong civil society. Nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience engrain our country’s DNA, and such acts of resistance from time to time — often from marginalized people — have saved us from the grips of governmental overreach. In this, the legacy of India’s leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and BR Ambedkar looms large, who laid the foundations of non-violent mass mobilization and resistance. These mass mobilizations not only fought peacefully but fiercely against political oppression (Gandhi), but also social oppression (Ambedkar), giving India a pioneering place in history, as the cradle of true grassroots multicultural democracy.

None can take democracy for granted, and the desire to have more unchecked executive power, like by Indira Gandhi’s government during the 1970s, tempts many governments, often justified as a way to bring “stability” and curb “unrest”. Such governments view criticism and protests as “too much democracy”, and if the public gives legitimacy to such usurpations, democracy can collapse, as it regularly collapses in our neighbouring country, Pakistan.

However, throughout its history, Indians have shown a ferocious appetite for democracy and freedom. The nonviolent movements across the country, led by students, played a critical role in restoring and strengthening our democracy during the emergency (1975-1978) when the country’s democratic institutions were systematically weakened. The fact that these civil disobedience movements were participated in by the masses and remained non-violent was a major reason why they gained public legitimacy, and the attempts of the government to portray these movements as “anarchy” failed. India emerged stronger after the emergency as a democracy.

Many do not consider India a full democracy. Outsized government powers to censor the media (e.g., BBC documentary on the 2002 Gujarat riots), shut down the internet (e.g., India shuts down the internet more than any other country), and prohibit non-violent protests (e.g., most recently in Ladakh) are some of the examples of systemic overreach of executive power in India. Increasing instances of hate speech and persecution of minorities in India also pose a threat to individual rights and freedoms. The lack of transparency in the electoral funding of political parties is yet another imperfection in our democracy.

Weakening democracy

However, democracy is on a decline worldwide, driven by the rise of populism, polarization, and hate speech. Social media exploitation leads to the creation of radical and hate-filled echo chambers supported by unaccountable algorithms and design architecture (e.g., Twitter and WhatsApp in India) that promote clickbait and visceral content. In a time when hate speech is weakening our democratic muscle as a society, we need to strengthen civic society and involve the youth in community building and civil society works.

Social media, if used constructively, has the power to empower marginalized groups. For example, historically marginalized groups like Dalits, tribals, and LGBTQ persons are more engaged today than ever as civic groups thanks to the internet and social media. Twitter became a potent tool for civic engagement and help during the COVID-19 second wave, connecting people in need with volunteers and resources.

Despite these positive stories, our graduates and young professionals in India today have limited civic engagement and volunteering experience. They focus too much on topping particular exams and achieving particular grades and too little on socially conscious volunteering. The sense of citizenship can erode in such a hypercompetitive environment for the youth where jobs still remain scarce. Educational institutions and corporations must do their due to ensure that India’s youth understand their responsibilities as citizens. We must involve our youth in volunteering and socially conscious work and value those youngsters with genuine civic engagement backgrounds. If our youth engages with the grassroots issues of our times, courageously using their right to self-expression, our democracy will be safe. Democracy, after all, is only as deep as the depth of community engagement of its citizens with their country.

(This article is based on a talk given by Prateek Raj at the St Joseph’s University, Bangalore, on the 24 April 2024 titled the Past, Present and the Future of Indian Democracy)

The previlege of dedicating oneself to "professional" work

PRATEEK RAJ April 2024, LinkedIn

As I navigate through my 30s, I have found a realization that evaded my 20s - it is a privilege to dedicate oneself entirely to career advancement, a luxury not everyone can afford.

I encounter many young, newly minted MBAs who are deeply concerned with perfecting their already stellar resumes. Questions like “Should I take on another internship?”, “Will starting an NGO showcase my leadership skills?”, and “Was I good enough if I got just a 'good' from my boss?” fill their conversations. Their dedication is commendable and often rewarded in our productivity-driven workplaces.

However, what I’ve come to understand—and have previously touched upon—is that professional work is not the sole form of work. Those who can devote 16 hours a day to their careers are often in a position where personal responsibilities are either minimal, handled by others, or they are fortunate enough to not face societal barriers that demand their time and energy.

Yet, many young individuals must navigate beyond these professional confines. They engage in care work, address household issues, manage health challenges, mentor others, contribute to community efforts, and face both practical and emotional obstacles associated with discrimination. This is particularly true for those from marginalized backgrounds, who often bear a heavier burden.

Over time I've shifted my perspective: instead of admiring those who excel consistently, I now deeply value the grit and empathy of those who, despite substantial struggles, manage to hold everything together. Those facing institutional disadvantages often develop a profound capacity for empathy, embodying the reassurance that "this too shall pass."

Reflecting on this, a quote from Tim Cook resonates deeply. Recounting his experiences as a gay man, he said: “So let me be clear: I'm proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me. Being gay has given me a deeper understanding of what it means to be in the minority and provided a window into the challenges that people in other minority groups deal with every day. It’s made me more empathetic, which has led to a richer life. It’s been tough and uncomfortable at times, but it has given me the confidence to be myself, to follow my own path, and to rise above adversity and bigotry. It’s also given me the skin of a rhinoceros, which comes in handy when you’re the CEO of Apple.”

I would like to change the conversation around excellence and merit. Nobody is ever going to be No 1 in this world. It is a nonsensical idea. Who is not meritorious in this world? Each human being excels in their own way. Instead of grading each other on a scale, we must learn to nurture each other, share each other’s burden. That is true merit and excellence.

Letter expressing disappointment on PM’s recent hate speech

PRATEEK RAJ 23 April 2024, Open letter

23rd of April, 2024

To,

The Prime Minister of India

New Delhi

Subject: Letter expressing disappointment on PM’s recent hate speech

Registration No. : PMOPG/E/2024/0075784.

I write this letter in utter disappointment and a sense of betrayal. In your recent speech during an election rally in Rajasthan on the 21st of April, 2024, you referred to our fellow citizens from the Muslim community as "ghuspatiye" or infiltrators, shocking many citizens like me. It was a statement beneath the honourable office of the Prime Minister. In this position, you are oath-bound to be a servant of ALL citizens of India, regardless of their religion and community. You breached that oath.

On the 7th of January, 2022, I wrote to you concerned about the rising hate speech in India. The letter requested you "to stand firm against forces that seek to divide us," asking for "your leadership to turn our minds and hearts, as a nation, away from inciting hatred against our people." In 2024, with your words that abet hate against particular religious groups, which are laden with pandering malicious falsities, including bogus claims of community-targeted wealth redistribution, you have breached the constitutional trust. You have corrupted the highest executive office of the land for a few crass cheers and pandering. Not just your silence but now your words themselves abet a dangerous kind of mass madness that has the risk of instigating hate, violence and persecution against minorities.

Your irresponsible words threaten the unity and integrity of the beautiful and diverse country that we have built with such sacrifices over a century and more. People like me shall always resist this hatred, committing ourselves to protecting the nation's constitution.

Today is Hanuman Jayanti, and it is a good day to remind you that those on the side of truth and dignity win, even when facing innumerable odds. I hope the day gives you an opportunity to contemplate on your words and actions.

With deep regret,

An Indian citizen,

Prateek Raj

Marriage equality: We won’t win this battle from the shadows

The fight for queer equality won’t be championed solely by well-intentioned allies advocating for us. It necessitates a ground-up approach, urging more of us to assert our presence and voice

PRATEEK RAJ 20 October 2023, Indian Express

Like millions of queer Indians, on October 17, I awaited the Supreme Court judgment on marriage equality with high expectations. In recent years, the community has ridden a wave of optimism, spurred by the landmark 2018 Navtej Johar v Union of India ruling, which ended nearly 150 years of marginalisation, amplified positive representation of queer individuals in global and national media, and led to the blossoming of queer communities across the nation through social networking and dating apps. As we awaited the judgment, our hopes soared, tempered by a dose of realism.

Many of us anticipated that achieving complete marriage equality might be a tall order, given the staunch, unexpected, and distasteful opposition exhibited by the government, coupled with the gender-specific nature of existing marriage laws that posed hurdles for same-sex couples. Nonetheless, we nurtured the hope that, at the very least, our fundamental right to enter into legally recognised civil unions would be acknowledged, and our legitimate demands for equal treatment with heterosexual couples on matters like adoption would be met. We were, and remain, convinced that the Supreme Court of India had the jurisdiction to recognise our equal rights.

However, as the judgment was pronounced, a dark cloud of disappointment enveloped the hopes and aspirations of the queer community. Not only were we denied marriage equality — a ruling that didn’t entirely shock us — but a 3-2 ruling also rebuffed our right to civil unions and equal treatment with heterosexual couples. If only the minority opinion led by Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud had prevailed, many of our most pressing demands would have been fulfilled.

The verdict left us feeling betrayed, angry, and outraged. Being told in eloquent yet dismissive terms that our second-class citizenship would persist, stung deeply. It was glaringly apparent, and should not escape anyone’s notice, that no queer person represented us in the judiciary or the government; a panel of heterosexual judges adjudicated the lives of millions of queer individuals. A popular meme within the community succinctly captured the court’s stance: “We hear you, we see you, we feel you, but we will do nothing.” This judgment was a bitter reminder of the long journey toward equality that lies ahead. It also revealed the apathy of those outside our community, as the verdict barely rippled through the broader public consciousness.

So, what’s next? The Supriyo v Union of India case, despite being a loss, marks a significant chapter in the history of queer rights, imparting crucial and hard-earned lessons — that freedom has a price. The fight for queer equality won’t be championed solely by well-intentioned allies advocating for us. It necessitates a ground-up approach, urging more of us to assert our presence and voice. The battle won’t be won from the shadows. Not everyone can come out or be a visible member of the queer community, as many encounter violence, discrimination, and humiliation in every sphere of life — at home, in the workplace, in religious, and family gatherings, and as this case illuminated, from our government. Hence, it’s imperative for individuals like myself, standing on relatively secure ground, to shoulder the responsibility of creating communities and safe spaces for other queer individuals. We cannot shirk our responsibility and our duty towards our community. Our lives would have been impossible without the sacrifices of queer individuals globally who fought for their and our rights and dignity. For instance, my favourite queer hero, Willem Arondeus, a gay artist who courageously stood against the Nazi regime. His fight was not only a resistance against fascist oppression but also a bold statement at a time when the Nazis were executing gays in concentration camps, killing thousands in the most dehumanising ways (e.g., shooting them as target practice). Arondeus’s last recorded words, “Let the people know that homosexuals are not cowards,” resonate throughout history. 

We have come a long way from the days of genocidal executions in concentration camps, although such inhuman treatment is still the formal punishment given to queer people in countries like Uganda and Iran. Informally still, queer people, especially trans people, face violence at disproportionately higher rates globally. India does not fare any better, and the negative Supreme Court judgement, along with the opposition of the government, doesn’t help. But with sacrifices of generations after generations of assertive and non-compromising queer people, we have been able to inherit a much more equal world than before. 

The queer movement has historically been a grassroots endeavour, seldom finding allies in governments, religious institutions, or even within families. Our struggle for rights and recognition has always been a ground-up fight, fueled by our own community’s resilience and determination. We will continue to live our lives, vocally, openly, and uncompromisingly as queer people, and support our community to grow together. We are too tough to be disheartened or demoralised, and we will do what we have always done — show up with pride.

Open letter to corporate India to de-fund hate speech

PRATEEK RAJ and 16 other signatories, 8 August 2023, Open letter

We, some of the current and retired faculty members at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, in our personal capacity, are writing this open letter to the leaders of corporate India, drawing their attention to the fragile state of internal security with an increasing risk of violent conflicts in the country, and appealing that they de-fund the spread of misinformation and hate speech through news channels and social media. 

Over the past few years, an open and public exhibit of hatred towards minorities in public discourse has become common practice in India: in political discourse,[i] television news,[ii] as well as on social media.[iii] The usage of othering, dehumanizing and demonizing language while referring to minorities has reached alarming levels,[iii], [iv] and acts of violent hate crimes, often by organized and radicalized groups, against minorities have seen a rise.[v], [vi], [vii] The inaction of police and security forces during recent communal riots,[viii], [ix] as well as the acquittal[x] or pardoning[xi] of culprits involved in rape and mass murder during previous instances of riots, coupled with the silence of authorities,[xii], [xiii] has signalled a glaring level of complacency in place of urgency by the government. 

These trends concern corporate India, as they point towards an increasing risk[xiv] of violent conflicts in the country. In the worst case, such acts of violence could culminate into a genocide,[xv] which would annihilate the social fabric as well as the economy of the country, casting a long dark shadow over India’s future. Corporate India, which hopes to reach new frontiers of international growth and innovation in the 21st century, cannot afford to live with even a small possibility of such a scenario. 

India has a long history of tolerance and peaceful coexistence of different faiths, and we would like to believe that the risk of large-scale violent conflicts or genocide in India is still small. However, this risk is no longer close to zero, as the rapidly increasing levels of radicalization of citizens are fermenting an atmosphere conducive to large-scale violence being triggered due to unexpected disturbances. Even if India does evade such a risk, it is certain that the deteriorating social fabric in the country, due to increasing hate and dehumanizing speech and radicalization, shall inevitably lead to escalating violence and socioeconomic uncertainty, permanently paralyzing the future of the country.

We believe that maintaining  peace, stability and cohesion in the country is of paramount importance to corporate India without which India cannot become an economic powerhouse. The leaders of corporate India have an important and substantial role to play in curbing the spread of hate and misinformation. We appeal to corporate India to:

1. STOP FUNDING HATE: Stop funding any and all news and social media organizations that publicly air hateful or genocidal content against a community of people. 

2. SUPPORT RESPONSIBLE STAKEHOLDERS: Conduct an internal audit to ensure that their funds, in forms like advertising or donations, go to only such stakeholders, like news and social media organizations that conduct themselves responsibly, and not fan the flames of hate and misinformation. 

3. CURATE A WELCOMING WORK CULTURE: Mandatorily conduct timely diversity and inclusion sensitization events within their organizations to ensure their work culture remains welcoming to people of a variety of faiths and social backgrounds. 

4. USE YOUR VOICE FOR FRATERNITY: Vocally ensure that India’s diverse social fabric, public discourse, and democratic institutions remain strong.

Use your voice to rise up against hate! 

[i] Anand, U. 2022. “Hate speeches sullying atmosphere in India: SC”. Hindustan Times. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/hate-speeches-sullying-atmosphere-in-india-sc-101665425122755.html

[ii] PTI, 2022. “Anguished over hate speeches on TV, SC wants to know if govt wants to bring law to curb them”. The Times of India.

https://m.timesofindia.com/india/anguished-over-hate-speeches-on-tv-sc-wants-to-know-if-govt-wants-to-bring-law-to-curb-them/amp_articleshow/94355811.cms

[iii] Raj, P. 2022. “How Twitter Weakened India’s Information Ecosystem”. ProMarket. https://www.promarket.org/2021/05/07/twitter-india-information-ecosystem-covid-19/

[iv] Srivastava, R. 2019. “Facebook a 'megaphone for hate' against Indian minorities”. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-india-content-idUSKBN1X929F

[v] Chitra, R. 2021. “How to cover hate crimes when government sources fail”. Oxford Reuters Institute. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2022-01/RISJ_Final%20Report_Rachel_2021_Final.pdf

[vi] Desk. 2023. “'They Operate From Pak': Jaipur Train Firing Accused's Chilling Video Sparks Outrage”. Hindustan Times. https://www.hindustantimes.com/videos/news/they-operate-from-pak-jaipur-train-firing-accuseds-chilling-video-sparks-outrage-watch-101690858087713-amp.html

[vii] Anand, A. 2023. “For days before violence in Haryana's Nuh, social media was rife with videos and threats.” The Times of India. https://m.timesofindia.com/city/gurgaon/for-days-before-violence-in-nuh-social-media-was-rife-with-videos-and-threats/articleshow/102332692.cms

[viii] PTI. 2022. “Jahangirpuri violence: 'Utter failure' on part of Delhi police, says court”. The Economic Times.https://m.economictimes.com/news/india/jahangirpuri-violence-utter-failure-on-part-of-delhi-police-says-court/amp_articleshow/91432801.cms

[ix] Mathur, A and S. Ojha. 2023. “‘What did police do for 14 days?’ Supreme Court asks Manipur for detailed report”. India Today. https://www.indiatoday.in/law/story/manipur-viral-video-case-survivors-move-fresh-plea-in-supreme-court-2413947-2023-07-31

[x] Dabhi, P. A. 2023. “2002 Naroda Gam massacre case: All accused, including Maya Kodnani, Babu Bajrangi, acquitted”. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/political-pulse/babu-bajrangi-who-made-admissions-in-sting-op-acquitted-8568001/lite/

[xi] Express News Service. 2022. “Centre cleared release of Bilkis case convicts, CBI & court opposed: Gujarat”. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/bilkis-bano-case-govt-approves-premature-release-of-11-life-term-convicts-gujarat-8214503/lite/

[xii] Yasir, S. 2021. “As Hindu Extremists Call for Killing of Muslims, India’s Leaders Keep Silent”. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/24/world/asia/hindu-extremists-india-muslims.html

[xiii] Purohit, P. 2023. “Manipur: Kicked around like a ball, assaulted girl quizzes CM Biren Singh”. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraphindia.com/amp/north-east/manipur-kicked-around-like-a-ball-assaulted-girl-quizzes-cm-biren-singh/cid/1953441

[xiv] Website, 2023. “Say #NoToHate - The impacts of hate speech and actions you can take”. United Nations. https://www.un.org/en/hate-speech

[xv] Chowdhury, D.R. 2021. “Is India headed towards an anti-Muslim genocide” Time Magazine. https://time.com/6103284/india-hindu-supremacy-extremism-genocide-bjp-modi/

Queer rights are essential for the progress of the nation

Socio-cultural and technological progress are intertwined and essential for the progress of the nation.

PRATEEK RAJ, 23 April 2023, Times of India

Sam Altman, the CEO and co-founder of Open AI, the company behind the revolutionary Chat GPT technology, is a gay man. As queer people fight for their equal rights in Indian courts, I can’t help but wonder – what would have happened to Sam Altman if he had been born in a society where he would have to wage a daily battle for equality?

This is not a hypothetical scenario. We don’t need to go too far back in history. The father of modern computer science (CS), Alan Turing, was a gay man too. The United Kingdom was at the frontier of computer science in the 1940s, with stalwarts like him leading the nascent CS revolution. Then, one day he was prosecuted and chemically castrated by his government for being gay, in 1952, at the dawn of the CS revolution. 

Turing, leading the CS revolution from the forefront (e.g., contributing to Manchester Mark 1), plummeted into depression and committed suicide in 1954. The leadership of the United Kingdom in CS technology died with him, and the base of the CS revolution migrated to the United States in the 1950s. The UK never recovered, and it has since then only fallen behind in the technological frontier. If only the UK had given Turing his basic human right to be equal, Silicon Valley might have been somewhere in Manchester and not San Francisco.

Why would any country’s government burden inequality on its queer citizens? The narrative of the government of India – that it tolerates queer people but does not legitimize their equality – is incoherent with its vision to make India a global technological and cultural leader. Queer people are some of the most creative and talented people, and if India does not grant the community equal rights, it will trigger an exodus of talent. Why would queer Indians not move to a country where they are treated as equals, where they do not have to be burdened by illegitimate state and social interference?

Marriage is a natural and deeply personal right. The proposal that politicians and priests should have a say in it is a bogus demand. Marriage is not a handout that a parliament or a government can grant when it wishes and take away when it wants. The right to marry can not change as per the ideological leanings of the country, such that a group of people is declared to be married today; and stripped away of that right tomorrow. Marriage is a human right and a personal act, and it can not be turned into a popularity or a debate contest. The right to marry hence, can not be legislated. It can only be declared as a natural right by the honorable constitutional court so that these rights are inalienable. 

Queer people want a life of love and fulfillment as equal and capable contributors to society, like anybody else. Most top universities in India today have queer support groups made of young talented individuals who have a lot to offer to this country. Many leading companies operating in India today have special programs to attract queer Indian talent to their fold. Who would not like to have the next Alan Turing, Lynn Conway, Tim Cook, or Sam Altman on their payroll? All universities and businesses should follow the path these top institutions have laid, and so should our society.

For a country that aspires to global leadership, marriage equality is an essential step in India’s progress. In a competitive world, India cannot afford to become the UK of the 1950s, which lost its way because it did not have the heart to treat a gay man with the dignity he deserved. India cannot side with ahistorical, unscientific, and insensitive parochialism if it truly aspires to be a Vishwa Guru. India should be the global leader in queer rights because which other country has a richer and more tolerant queer history that goes back for millennia? 

I hope India will soon be at the frontier of both socio-cultural and technological progress – the two are intertwined and essential for the progress of the nation.

Homophobia is a colonial legacy – government must break from it clearly

It must think twice before arguing in court that queer people and their dignity and equality would 'wreak havoc' in India. It must realise that young queer people need hope -- not government-sanctioned humiliation

PRATEEK RAJ, 28 March 2023, Indian Express

When the makers of the Indian constitution enshrined fundamental rights, they probably did not feel the need to explicitly spell out the right to companionship and family as additional ones. These natural rights are so fundamental that the constitution makers did not need to state the obvious. However, I wish they had. It would have saved queer people from many indignities.

Queer people have existed since the dawn of humanity. They are so fundamental to the makeup of society that indigenous cultures and faiths have accepted them matter-of-factly, like any other gender or orientation. The Kama Sutra, a treatise on the private lives of Pataliputra in around the 3rd century BCE, devoted an entire chapter and more to same-sex relations and courtship and passingly mentioned the customary practice of Parigraha, where two people of the same gender cohabited for life. As there existed no codified sanction of marriage in pre-modern India, all systems of marriage, including Parigraha, were customary. 

When Sarmad Kashani, a 17th-century Sufi mystic, fell in love with Abhai Chand, a Hindu man, Chand’s family eventually relented after some protest. They lived and traveled in India together for the rest of their lives. Sarmad’s popularity among locals in Delhi irked Emperor Aurangzeb so much that he was eventually executed. Martyred, one of his most famous poems, reverberates to this day, “There is no fault with a madman. The fault lies in you. Love hasn’t maddened you yet.”

As the world became “modern,” an obsession with positivistic classification and gender binaries emerged. Cultures that did not adhere to modern ideals of masculinity and femininity were labeled as savage-like. British imperialists became the prime exporters of the most acute form of homophobia. So vicious was the homophobia in Britain that their government chose to forcefully chemically castrate war hero, genius, and the father of modern computer science - Alan Turing - for his homosexuality. Turing committed suicide at 41, an year after the castration in 1954.

The British showed a willingness to reform, and today Britain ensures a life of basic equality and dignity for its queer citizens. Yet, the system of laws and attitudes that the British imprinted on their colonies wreaked havoc on the lives of queer people elsewhere. No community bore a greater brunt than India’s Hijra community, which was labeled as a criminal tribe in India under the Criminal Tribes Act 1871, with the movement and freedoms of the community as a whole severely curtailed under the law. While such laws have been removed, the stigma that they brought to the community has not faded away.

Nearly one crore young Indians (15 to 30 years old) must be gay, lesbian, or transgender (roughly 3% of the total population aged 15 to 30 - 35 crore), and many more are bisexuals. India’s total queer population is even larger, although most live in the closet discreetly. They grew up when being gay was a criminal act, facing a world where institutionalized homophobia at all levels of society was normal. While things have improved in the last few years (since the 2018 Navtej Singh Johar vs. Union of India), it does not imply that queer people can now live their lives fearlessly. Many challenges still exist, like the structurally imposed isolation that most queer people face daily.

The Indian government must think twice before arguing in court that queer people and their dignity and equality would wreak “complete havoc" in India. The court is not a theater of rhetoric and posturing. Same-sex marriage is a matter of life and death for crores of Indians affected by the decisions made about their lives, unfortunately without any representation from their community. 

The government should have made a minimal effort to consult India's queer citizens before making ahistorical, unscientific, and grossly insensitive statements, such as stating, “While the aforesaid conduct has been decriminalised, it has by no means been legitimised.” The government must develop some sensitivity to realize the far-reaching impact of its words on the lives of young queer people, who need hope, not government-sanctioned humiliation.

The government holds the responsibility to ensure the safety and well-being of all its citizens. If the government cannot recognize the full dignity of queer people, it should at least not come between their right to legitimately build a family so that they can find support among each other and create a place they call home. Queer people are not asking for more, just for the same rights that everyone else already has.

No government holds the authority to legislate whether a human deserves natural rights. Natural rights like companionship and family are inalienable - above the authority of any man-made institution. So, it is only reasonable that the government and the honorable constitutional bench confirm that the natural rights of queer people to love, companionship, and family cannot be infringed and give the community back the dignity it deserves.

Letter to the Prime Minister to stand firm against forces that seek to divide us

PRATEEK RAJ with 182 other signatories, 07 January 2022, Open Letter

7th January 2022

Dear Honourable Prime Minister:

We, the undersigned, request you and our elected members to preserve the culture of tolerance and diversity that defines our great nation. Hate speeches and calls for violence against communities based on religion/caste identities is unacceptable. Our Constitution gives us the right to practice our religion with dignity – without fear, without shame. There is a sense of fear in our country now – places of worship, including churches in recent days, are being vandalised, and there have been calls to take arms against our Muslim brothers and sisters. All of this is carried out with impunity and without any fear of due process.

We expect our leaders to safeguard our Constitutional rights. We expect our leaders to ensure safety and security for every Indian citizen. We expect our leaders to motivate us to be human and look beyond differences based on caste, religion, language, and other identities. Your silence on the rising intolerance in our country, Honourable Prime Minister, is disheartening to all of us who value the multicultural fabric of our country. Your silence, Honourable Prime Minister, emboldens the hate-filled voices and threatens the unity and integrity of our country.

We request you, Honourable Prime Minister, to stand firm against forces that seek to divide us. We ask your leadership to turn our minds and hearts, as a nation, away from inciting hatred against our people. We believe that a society can focus on creativity, innovation, and growth, or society can create divisions within itself. We want to build an India that stands as an exemplar of inclusiveness and diversity in the world.

We, the undersigned faculty, staff, and students of the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) and Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA), hope and pray that you will lead the country in making the right choices.

Yours sincerely,

Prateek Raj with 182 other signatories

Transparency, participation, and accountability: Three ways to fix Indian cities

How do we fix the problem of monstrously bad city governments in India? Genuine city governance reforms are a must.

PRATEEK RAJ, 26 November 2021, Forbes India

I am just sick of the roads in Bengaluru. Literally! Its bumpy and dusty roads give me motion sickness. Main roads like Bengaluru’s Bannerghatta Road that began “repairs” two years ago are still “work in progress”, worsening every rainy spell. Repair and maintenance of auxiliary roads are not even on the radar. This is not the condition of Bengaluru alone. Delhi, yet again, is shrouded by a poisonous cloud that takes away almost ten years from the lives of Delhi residents. Lack of action on this front is slow collective suicide. In other big cities like Mumbai, floods are a regular occurrence. In smaller cities like Ranchi, electricity is inconsistent, making it impossible for digitally connected people to work there. For all the taxes collected, where do the funds go? They usually do not bring any visible benefits to people in tangible physical or social infrastructure. It does, however, fund a regal lifestyle of politicians and other government servants and also their monuments and advertising.   

Why are Indian cities so bad? Indian cities have no government—no accountable mayor, no empowered city council. The effective executive in power tends to be a chief minister tasked with running a province that rivals the size of many major countries. The welfare of cities is just one of the many concerns they address, which they delegate to a web of overlapping ministries and agencies with different figureheads. Usually, the delegation of accountability is not clear. Who is responsible if a road is not being repaired? The CM, the MP, the MLA, the Mayor, the minister of transport, some local transport bureaucrat, the DM? Even with 70 years of democracy, we still don’t know.  

The problem of governance in India is systemic. Indian democracy was not designed with cities in mind. While municipal and village governments were later created with devolution (like the 1993 reforms), the powers these local governments wield are largely ceremonial. We do not know who is the mayor of any of the big cities. Delhi, which was evolving a system of local autonomy, has also been handcuffed in the past few years as the centre and the Delhi government jostle for power. There is an ever-greater trend towards centralisation, which is ironic for a country that claims to be the world’s largest democracy. Even China, a ruthless autocracy by most standards, offers greater powers to its local governments and career progress avenues to local executives if they show impressive development in the cities.  

How do we fix the problem of monstrously bad city governments in India? Genuine city governance reforms are a must. Almost all cities of the world have mayors who hold actual powers to tax, police and manage development projects. Indian cities also need local executives (e.g., mayors) who wield more powers—creating a third tier of recognisable governments, accountable for the running of their city. Such executive power should not be held by bureaucrats who get transferred every few years, as is the current system. They have no skin in the game. It is only effective local electoral democracy that can make politicians deliver. We have never had such a decentralised electoral system.

Such a devolved system of government is unlikely to come to fruition soon because of two reasons. Firstly, creating a new layer of power structure is a political quagmire. Will the Chief Ministers like to cede their power over their resourceful cities to some other mayor? It will create a rival power centre in the state. Similarly, will existing bureaucracy support such decentralisation given that elected city governments will erode power away from them? Due to such misaligned incentives, we rarely hear about city governance reforms. The call for it must come from the grassroots. 

The second factor that limits city governance reforms is the genuine concern that decentralised governments without a disciplined bureaucratic backbone will be unwilling to defend the basic principles of the constitution, such as rights to local minority and marginalised groups. This was one of the reasons why BR Ambedkar was sceptical of Mahatma Gandhi’s dream of designing India as a decentralised village republic. These concerns are genuine, which is why cities or urban clusters may be the appropriate unit for devolution. They are large enough to represent a diversity of voices at once while also having a supporting bureaucratic backbone to ensure adherence to constitutional values.

However, as long as these city governance reforms don’t come to fruition, the only alternatives citizens have are data and transparency, and possibly public litigations forcing governments to become responsible for that dangerous pothole in the middle of a highway and that manhole in the footpath. We need a nationwide and publicly crowdsourced dashboard, which provides a live status check of basic amenities like roads, water, electricity, pollution throughout the country. It must also provide the contact details of officials who are at least nominally responsible for maintaining these utilities. Empowered with such data, citizens will slowly wake up to their rights and demand action, if not from the government then from the judiciary. Ideally, the media should do these jobs. But as long as they focus on entertainment and sensationalism over the news, citizens themselves must take charge. 

Transparency, participation, and accountability are the three pillars of good city governments. If we want better roads, drains, water, and air in India, we must work on all three.

Universal basic wealth is a better option to protect vulnerable poor

Today's wage slavery needs to be addressed with an option that gives citizens of the country ownership over some substantial property or wealth on which they can build their lives as they please 

PRATEEK RAJ, 3 September 2021, Forbes India

Do we need to work to live well? If you look at the tiny sliver of the top 0.001 percent—their families often do not do market labour. They live off the rents they raise from their accumulated capital. A few of them may be self-made, but the larger mass of the wealthy are the inherited folks. They are the landlords. If we do not question the inherited entitlement of the rich—the Trumps, for example—why do we question such a desire of the poor? 

The coronavirus pandemic has taught us that some occupations are more essential than others. We need the farmers, the sanitation workers, the doctors and nurses, more than the landlords at this moment. Yet, the landlords and the rent-seekers hold significantly more wealth than the essential workers who live vulnerable lives—paycheck to paycheck. There is something sick about such a system, where the classes that do not work preach the gospel of work to those who do. "The poor are lazy," they say, while they live off rents.

People have identified and stated this irony, and the response to this irony has varied. Marx advocated for communism—a proletariat revolution against the capitalist rent-seekers to socialise the means of production. But by collectivising ownership, communism (Marxist-Leninism) made states overbearingly autocratic, directly leading to its decline.

We have learnt from the past that the best response to the above irony is not communism. Over the last decade, new ideas have emerged to tackle this problem of unfair inequality. The first idea is that community support is an essential pillar of the social support modern economies need. While communities matter and their importance can not be undermined, yet they can help the vulnerable only in limited ways. In countries like India, community matters probably too much. While a majority of Indians are unable to raise emergency funds during a crisis, among those who can raise such funds almost half of them get it from their family and friends. The problem is that poor people have poor communities and rich people have rich communities.

The second idea is of universal basic income, which posits everybody should get a monthly check from the government that is large enough for them to live just fine—whether or not they work. This idea seems to be a closer response to the question—does a person have a right to live well even if they refuse to labour?

Basic income proponents say yes, yet there remains a problem. This system creates a dependency on the government. Basic income is not a right, it is only a handout. As long as the government is charitable the public will get that income. If the government and its ideas change, the public will once again be deprived of such basic income. Basic income still does not address a fundamental problem. It is wealth, not income that leaves millions vulnerable and exposed to uncertainty. The rent-seekers get a good deal not because of their high incomes, but because they have wealth—inherited or not—that they can seek rent off.

Hence, a way forward—distinct from communism, community orientation or basic income—is the path of universal basic wealth. We need to create such conditions that nobody is compelled to work just because they have rent to pay. Such work-so-you-can-pay-the-bills is a form of wage slavery that we need to address today. We need to develop the idea of personal sovereignty, where all citizens of a country have ownership over some substantial property or wealth on which they can build their lives as they please.

The idea of basic wealth can rest on three social endowments that every adult can be gifted unconditionally with:

1.      A basic house or apartment—an unconditional gift to them from society or the state.

2.      Access to individual savings that were made on their behalf while they were growing up, collectively by society or the state in a National Childhood Fund. 

3.      Unconditional emergency funding, especially that arise for emergency and rare disease healthcare needs (see MediCorps).

The coronavirus pandemic offers us a chance to relook at how we support each other. Basic wealth in the form of three endowments—a house, some savings, and emergency funding—can help in reducing vulnerability in the lives of people, and turn them into their own little sovereigns. 

It is possible that some say these ideas are costly or difficult, but when implemented on a war footing, building housing to shelter all is not a radical idea. Singapore is close to achieving such universal housing. Similarly, unconditional basic income to children which can be accessed when they grow up, maybe more effective—better targeted and affordable than universal basic income, cash transfers or subsidies. In the same way, unconditionally insured emergency healthcare funding is a low hanging fruit that can help bring millions of lives out of fear and insecurity. None of these ideas is radical, but together these solutions can provide a new deal—a package of basic wealth that can protect people, especially the poorest.

How Twitter Weakened India’s Information Ecosystem

India’s Covid-19 crisis is a reminder that Indian democracy is also in a crisis, partly due to an information ecosystem where facts and criticism are suppressed, hateful voices are amplified, and public conversation steers away from vital issues like health care.

PRATEEK RAJ, 7 May 2021, ProMarket

India is currently facing a crushing second Covid-19 surge that is killing thousands of Indians every day. To understand how India got here, we must understand the weakening of India’s information ecosystem over the last few years.

Just before the current surge, the country started to open prematurely at a time when India’s mammoth vaccination drive had just begun. The country was in a jubilant mood, based on the belief that India was in its Covid “endgame.” While Covid-19 cases were already on the rise in India, on March 21, Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared in national front-page advertisements inviting people to Kumbh, a mass religious gathering of Hindus. Some seven million people attended. Then, on April 6, five Indian states and territories held elections where tens of millions of people voted. In mid-April, while thousands were dying each day, politicians continued to hold election rallies in the battleground state of West Bengal.

With Indians distracted by a deluge of scandals and conspiracies, public conversation on health care remained on the backburner. At the World Economic Forum’s Davos summit in January, Modi claimed to have strengthened India’s “Covid specific infrastructure.” Such claims received little public scrutiny. India’s Covid taskforce had stopped its regular meetings in the months that preceded the second wave. Hence, India was unprepared when the second wave of the pandemic, appropriately called a “tsunami,” hit the nation. When the country woke up, it was too late: There were no beds, no oxygen, no medicines, and even no crematoriums and burial grounds available.

Over the last few years, India has seen a new style of crisis management: the government relies on suppressing information on social media, and in the worst cases shuts down an area’s internet. Twitter’s transparency report shows a dramatic rise in removal requests from Indian government agencies (rarely made by the courts). Between the first half of 2018 and the first half of 2020, Twitter reported, such non-court requests increased elevenfold to 2,772—the company complied with 13.8 percent of these requests. In February 2021, a young climate activist, Disha Ravi, was arrested for sedition when she helped organize an international Twitter solidarity campaign supporting farmers who protested against a controversial farm bill in India. Hundreds of Twitter accounts and tweets were suspended by Twitter, as demanded by the government.

Even at the height of the Covid-19 crisis, the suppression of information continues. To minimize negative coverage, the government once again ordered Twitter to censor several dozen critical tweets, and Twitter obeyed. Facebook temporarily blocked the trend #ResignModi, which trended on the platform as people expressed their anger, by “mistake.” Certain critical posts that the government labeled as “spreading misinformation” were removed from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. In some states, the government tried to undermine the severity of the crisis by underreporting data and intimidating those who exposed the reality by pleading for help. In the city of Bhopal, the actual number of deaths in April are estimated to be 25 times more than the official figure of 109. To give a positive spin on the news, the Health Minister of India emphasized that India’s fatality rate was the lowest in the world—at a time when India’s Covid fatalities were the highest.

Amidst all this, Twitter became a source of help for Indians, especially because a significant number of politicians, government officials, institutions, and influential figures are active on the platform. Twitter is akin to a town square, where the whole country is having a conversation. Tens of thousands of users tweeted SOS calls for help every day as they searched for beds, oxygen, or medicine for their loved ones; in many cases, the Twitter community helped them with important leads. Twitter has been a useful source of information during India’s pandemic crisis, as it helped match those in need with life-saving information.

Many crowdsourced efforts have been spearheaded by Twitter users to help those in need, but not all collective actions on Twitter are meant for the public good. For years, many Twitter accounts have collectively organized in India to promote extreme and hateful ideologies, diverting the public from urgent issues like public health. These accounts engage in coordinated Twitter campaigns and use Twitter’s “trending” topic feature to amplify their agenda. There exists no effective mechanism that Twitter uses to suppress dehumanizing trends that blatantly target entire communities.

A dangerous and orchestrated Twitter hashtag that trended nationally in India on February 29, 2020, was a call for an economic boycott (#आर्थिक_बहिष्कार) of the Muslim community, during the deadly Delhi riots. It was a sensitive moment for India as the country’s national capital saw a bloodbath that killed 53 people, the majority of them Muslims. During this sensitive time, Twitter became an amplifier of a call for economic boycott. This wasn’t the first time that a call for such boycott trended nationally—a similar trend (#मुस्लिमो_का_संपूर्ण_बहिष्कार) had trended nationally in India in October 2019 for a day. During the first wave of the pandemic in early April 2020 hashtags such as #CoronaJihad and “Muslims means terrorist” (#मुस्लिम_मतलब_आतंकवादी) trended nationally on Twitter, following reports of a Covid-19 super-spreader event in Delhi linked to an Islamic congregation.

For a company like Twitter, with such advanced technical expertise, it is dangerously negligent to be incapable or unwilling to identify trends that target and dehumanize entire communities. Suppressing such dehumanizing content does not require scanning millions of tweets, but just keeping a tab on those 20 odd hashtags/phrases that trend nationally on Twitter every day. But Twitter did not bother to even monitor its national trends, as verified far-right journalists tweeted calls for such boycotts. In contrast, in February 2021, when online activists made a hashtag #ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide in support of the farm law trend, Twitter blocked several accounts using the hashtag, following a strong reaction from the government.

There is no dearth of dehumanizing content on Twitter in India that is amplified each day, either as recommendations or as trends by Twitter algorithms. This creates a peculiar marketplace for ideas, where the most outrageous and outright dehumanizing content trends nationally and poisons the public conversation, while critical voices are suppressed. Such an ecosystem emboldens hate speech not just by anonymous trolls but also by verified personalities trying to capture this extreme audience.

The real victim of this information ecosystem is public discourse on issues of governance. For example, during the 2019 Indian national elections, a pan-national survey of around 270 thousand voters found that jobs, better health care, and clean water were the three most important issues for them. However, the primetime news in India did little coverage of such issues during elections. A word-cloud analysis of Twitter hashtags promoted during prime time by Republic, India’s most popular English news channel, showed that these vital issues like jobs, health care and water found little to no coverage during elections, as opposed to hot-button topics like Pakistan, dynastic politics, and communal politics.

Following far-right groups, other political and social groups have also begun organizing political campaigns on Twitter. While there is no dearth of diverse critical voices on Indian Twitter despite the attempts at censorship, the information ecosystem that Twitter amplifies is still filled with outrage, harassment, and fractionalization. As a result, the entire information ecosystem of India is being poisoned.

This is a concern that has been highlighted in the 2019 Stigler Center report (that I contributed to) on digital platforms and the media: Since digital platforms are legally considered carriers of information under the Section 230 exemption of the US Communications Decency Act, they lack the accountability for the content they feature or recommend through their algorithms, unlike traditional news media, which is legally accountable for every word it prints. The report finds that these giants enjoy a “hidden subsidy worth billions of dollars,” and at the same time enjoy immunity from the consequences of the content they trend and recommend.

Although Twitter has followed many censorship dictates of the Indian government, it still pretends to be an arena of freedom of speech. More realistically, Twitter is being used as a propaganda machine in India by competing groups, and its algorithms amplify orchestrated and visceral propaganda through its recommendations and trends. Twitter is not a passive party in India’s information ecosystem: Along with WhatsApp, Twitter is the favored platform for spreading misinformation, disinformation, and xenophobia in India. Both these platforms work very differently: Twitter editorializes its content, while WhatsApp chat rooms cannot be editorialized thanks to the end-to-end encryption. Hence, the solutions needed to improve both these information systems are distinct. As I wrote in a previous piece about WhatsApp’s misinformation problem in India for ProMarket, there is no one-size-fits-all policy that will work for all digital platforms.

Given the situation, regulators and policymakers, especially in the US, have a role to play. The American public should delve into the role US companies are playing in destabilizing democracies around the world by wreaking havoc on their marketplace for ideas. For example, in Myanmar, Facebook and its subsidiary WhatsApp have been used to spread hate against the Rohingya Muslim minority.

Although it may be difficult for social media companies to monitor every hate message on their platform, these digital giants are fully responsible for the content they feature or recommend. Ideally, these companies should have self-regulated themselves and should have never allowed hateful and dehumanizing content to trend and be recommended on their platforms. Unfortunately, companies like Twitter have failed to do so over the years. Hence, policymakers need to develop guidelines regarding what social media companies like Twitter can algorithmically showcase as trends and recommendations to their users so that they follow historically well-established journalistic guidelines of publication. If we fail to do so, a divisive information ecosystem would fractionalize nations around the world along narrow lines and hinder focus on things that matter, such as health care and public goods.

Tamil Nadu’s sui generis development model

A common Tamil identity laid the ground for socio-economic growth. It must now promote market-based entities 

PRATEEK RAJ and PRASSANNA VENKATESH B, 15 December 2020, Hindu Business Line

Tamil Nadu is one of the richest States. The State leads the country in achievements in sustainable development goals, and it ranks at the top in economic freedom rankings. For most of its contemporary history, Tamil Nadu has been ruled by stars from the movie industry. The Economist in 2013 called the politics and economics of the State to be “eccentric”.

But the growth and political model of Tamil Nadu is not eccentric at all, and it fits well with the broad model of endogenous growth, customised to the Indian context, where human capital drives productivity and growth, that in return drives investments in human capital. As the global pandemic forces countries to reassess their development, Tamil Nadu’s “eccentric” model can provide some lessons.

India is a diverse country, and such societies if fragmented can have a tough time producing public goods accessible to the commons. The reason is straightforward: when there is little social unity, people want goods and services for their own communities, which come at the cost of fewer essential public goods like health and education.

However, such divisiveness need not be the inevitable fate of diverse nations. People have multiple identities like caste, language, religion, profession, etc. A key question for a diverse society to ask is: Which identity is more salient politically, to people? When that salient identity creates divisions between people, it creates fractionalisation — limiting production of public goods. However, when that identity is unifying, it helps lay the ground for socio-economic growth through appropriate public investments.

Common linguistic identity

Tamil Nadu followed a unique approach to State building in the 20th century, where ideas promoting a common Tamil identity, built around its ancient Tamil language, was popularised by mass media in the early decades of Independence. Such Tamil identity helped reduce the narrow walls of caste that existed historically, as the linguistic commonality became a salient unifier for people.

In 1901, it was common in Tamil Nadu to meet a Vadugamuthu Pillai, a Chellappa Nayakker or a Ramasamy Thevar. One could identify a person’s caste just by the surname, as is still the case in most parts of India. Today, however, one usually meets a Vadugamuthu, Chellappa and Ramasamy, and the disappearance of caste surnames is part of a broader anti-caste self-respect movement propagated by the 20th century social reformer Periyar.

Using Tamil cinema and print publications, Periyar’s followers, most saliently screenwriter and orator CN Annadurai, propagated the ideas of self-respect movement in the broader public through movies and plays. Annadurai’s time marked the transition of Tamil movies, which before him portrayed the lives of kings and epics.

His works started to portray the lives of common people with whom the public could easily identify with. His followers Karunanidhi (a screenplay writer famous for his dialogues in the movie Parasakthi (1952)) and MGR (MG Ramachnadran, the original Tamil superstar) continued this trend and actively used movies to inculcate a sense of common ‘Tamizhan’ centred around the love for Tamil language. All these three personalities became powerful Chief Ministers of the State, and so did J Jayalalitha, an MGR follower who herself was a leading actress of Tamil cinema.

Economic clusters and freebies

This common Tamil identity helped in creating a political climate where more public goods could be provided — like construction of schools, roads and electrification in almost every village, or construction of smaller dams across the State. Stable governments in Tamil Nadu actively focussed on public education (especially of depressed classes), public health (especially of and by women), and business (especially through establishment of business-friendly Special Economic Zones, or SEZs).

SEZs attracted industrial investments in the State both before and especially since liberalisation. Today, Tamil Nadu is home to the most number of factories and SEZs in India.

Unlike Bengaluru which is the sole driver of investment sentiment in Karnataka, in Tamil Nadu, multiple cities like Coimbatore, Tiruchi, Salem, Erode, Tirupur, Madurai and Thoothukudi have emerged as independent economic clusters. These cities act as drivers of economic growth by mobilising people from nearby rural regions to cities.

This has helped Tamil Nadu achieve an impressive 49 per cent urbanisation rate, and has created a sustainable manufacturing economy. Such urban regions generate large revenues for the State that gets used to fund its various welfare programmes, creating a virtuous circle.

Tamil Nadu parties depend on competitive populism to attract voters, which continues even today in the form of offering freebies. These freebie schemes have taken a toll on the financial health of the State, but few schemes like free bicycle, free mixie and grinder, free cattle, and free health insurance have also provided the poor with assets and wealth. The money which had not been spent on buying these assets, could now be spent on education, healthcare and business, aiding human capital and economic development.

Ending patronage politics

Tamil Nadu’s economic model isn’t necessarily sustainable. Freebies that create wealth for the poor can only be offered if the economic engine works through concurrent promotion of enterprise and public goods. This requires a fine balance. Crony capitalism and clientelism weaken this balance in liberal economies around the world. Just as the coronavirus is most deadly for less immune people, the same way the economic impact of the pandemic will be most devastating for economies that fail to overcome cronyism and clientelism.

Fiscal mismanagement, political patronage to particular enterprises and communities, and rampant corruption risk stagnating Tamil Nadu’s economy in a manner similar to many Latin American countries. To escape such a fate, Tamil Nadu’s public and politicians need prudence, a focus on promotion of impartial market-based institutions, and of public goods. The same advice can be offered to all other States, too.

India’s Covid-19-led reverse migration could be an opportunity for its Hindi heartland

PRATEEK RAJ and RISHIKESHA KRISHNAN, 16 June 2020, Quartz

The coronavirus pandemic has caused an unprecedented disruption in the global economy. This disruption has forced businesses and investors to reconsider where and how to invest. Such a shake-up opens an opportunity for India, especially for its Hindi heartland.

Since liberalisation, while the south and west Indian states tapped the benefits of globalisation, the Hindi heartland could not. This led to a flight of talent and labour from the region to the southern and western states where better opportunities were to be found. While the region improved in human development indicators, it still has high levels of poverty and an often-unnoticed metropolis vacuum — a large region cutting across north and east India with a population of more than 500 million lacks a major metropolitan agglomeration.

The Hindi heartland should use this disruptive opportunity to address its metropolis vacuum, and focus on reversing the flight by building attractive economic clusters and inclusive markets in the region.

The region is endowed with a young population and many top institutions. Taking inspiration from anchoring universities like Stanford and the University of California San Diego, the government can utilise institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur and IIT Varanasi, to anchor enterprises and innovation in the Kanpur-Lucknow and Prayagraj-Varanasi regions.

The region, by identifying and developing multiple economic clusters centered around its many cities, will not only encourage urban development but also promote the development of surrounding rural areas, by promoting the production of value-added and specialised products and services in the hinterland, marketable for a global economy.

There exists a skill gap even among the educated youth because the school/college curriculums are not updated to teach a portfolio of basic skills needed for the digital economy. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) can be utilised to offer (mandated) short online courses that teach students basic skills in areas like time and project management, basic financial accounting, and tools such as Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, and video/audio editing.

Ingredients of attractive markets

In order to build successful economic clusters, the region is endowed with some key strengths.

The digital infrastructure, successfully developed in India since the 2000s, has reduced transaction costs. But, in order to fully tap the fruits of the information revolution, the government needs to also improve information delivery especially where market access is poor, and necessary information on how to produce, package and sell goods and services may not be available.

A key driver of location choice today is logistical and supply chain proximity, ie how easily can goods, services, and people be moved from one part of the world to another. Hence, the government now needs to prioritise improved transport connections by building industrial corridors in the region.

For a densely populated region like the Gangetic plain, the benefits of building such modern transport connections are even more crucial as by reducing commute times between twin cities like Prayagraj-Varanasi the region can achieve its rapid agglomeration as a twin-city.

A perception of weak rule of law has marred the region’s reputation. There is a need to build strong and steady institutions that protect life and property, provide policy stability, and develop contractual infrastructure that gives the foundation for doing business.

The region has one of the lowest per capita levels of police force, which hampers law & order. Investment should be made to expand and modernise the police force. During times of transformation (a time of uncertainty), governments need strong institutions that can be built by developing clearly set, well thought out, and unchanging guidelines and regulations from an early period, that are well publicised.

The region is socially hyper-fragmented. Such hyper-fragmentation creates cleavages in society, which are antagonistic to the region’s goal of rapid growth and transformation. The region needs to build a common inclusive identity around regional and local pride, in order to build civic citizenship.

One way to boost local pride and engagement is by improving civic amenities, for example, the Indore Swachhta Abhiyan (Hindi). Such a creation of boundary spanning identity is possible, given that Indian voters across demographic groups prioritise similar sets of issues that relate to the economy (jobs), civic amenities, and the local environment.

Choosing the right economic model

There are several growth models of cluster-led growth that the Hindi heartland can learn from.

The Chinese Pearl River Delta has successfully transformed itself into a $2 trillion economy and the world’s greatest manufacturing hub. Such transformation (benefiting Uttar Pradesh as well) is also happening in Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR).

Successful regional clusters enjoy high levels of political autonomy, and the power to set their own policies, future direction, and taxation. The region can follow this model of autonomous cluster formation in regions like Prayagraj-Varanasi and Kanpur-Lucknow.

Economic clusters of the Hindi heartland need to quickly step up in the entrepreneurship and innovation space.

Additionally, it is necessary for the region to look at growth and inclusion as complements. Investor friendly reforms (like labour reforms) need to be balanced with public investments that encourage social mobility and human development.

States in south India and Bangladesh have used their economic growth to generate revenue that funds social and market inclusion through investment in public health, education, and credit, with a special focus on women and social safety net. Such inclusion (with improvements in human development) then further accelerates economic development creating a virtuous cycle of growth.

The pandemic, the subsequent lockdown, and the return of migrants home open up an opportunity for the region. The time is now ripe for the Hindi heartland to achieve sustained double-digit growth. The governments in the Hindi heartland organise astonishing governance feats such as the Kumbh Mela. Hence, they hold the governance capability to create dynamic and autonomous economic clusters, with proper emphasis on institutions, transportation linkages, and inclusion.

Why do migrants get such a raw deal? 

It isn’t clear if the Centre or States are responsible for their welfare. Setting up a migrant welfare ministry would be in order 

MANASWINI BHALLA, PRATEEK RAJ and TRILOCHAN SASTRY, 11 May 2020, Hindu Business Line

The coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent lockdown has left tens of millions of migrant workers in India stranded in their host States with little social safety net. A survey of over 11,000 migrant workers by Stranded Workers Action Network (SWAN) found that three weeks into the lockdown (mid-April) 70 per cent of workers had less than ₹200 left with them, and 98 per cent of them had not received any cash from the government, 89 per cent of them had not received any pay from their employers. 

Even when the Central government allowed stranded workers to return to their home States in late April, several administrative deadlocks and confusions emerged. For example, the Bihar government failed to provide permission to run trains from Kerala to bring migrants back home.

The Karnataka government went a step further in showing its apathy towards migrant workers — after talking to a lobby of prominent builders in the State they decided to cancel the migrant trains and take away the right of migrants to return home. In Karnataka, until mid-April, 93 per cent of the stranded workers had not received any ration supplies from the government as per the SWAN survey. 

Yet, the government now assures to provide workers with “essential facilities” but still not the fundamental right to free movement and voluntary work. Does the government realise that in coordination with the builder lobby, it is turning migrant workers into bonded labour?

Lack of intent?

Why has the Indian state — which includes central, provincial, and local administrations — been so inept at helping the stranded migrants? The Indian administration is not new to executing initiatives at a mass scale, like organising the elections or the Kumbh. Critics say that the problem is lack of intent — poor migrant workers are invisible to the governments. They point at the class bias that exists in the administrative response. Stranded students, tourists and pilgrims that occupied a higher class than workers, were afforded a dramatically prompt, efficient and dignified treatment, while migrant workers were provided no such support.

However, there exists a more fundamental issue that the faltering government response exposes — who is responsible for the welfare of the migrant workers in India — the host State, the home State, or the Central government, or all of them?

The answer remains unclear as migrants are the only group of people that have been included in India’s Concurrent List. As long as accountability and power remain ambiguously distributed it will lead to confusion. Without clear accountability, advance planning and contingency arrangements for their welfare won’t be made. 

Help the poor first

The crisis requires national leadership, as it is a national issue. The best way to urgently help the migrant workers is to help the poor — whether stranded migrants or not. The poor should be immediately offered unconditional cash transfers by the Central government. 

The Central and State governments in India, till date, have only released paltry sums to support the poor in the lockdown, and the support extended to migrant workers is even less.

We expect the size of effective but small cash transfers (half of a migrant worker’s median monthly wage of around ₹10,000) and other benefits to the poor to run into lakhs of crores. The Central government should immediately do such spending. 

If we do not allay the concerns of the stranded migrants today and let them slide into further poverty, they may hesitate to return to the cities when normalcy returns causing long term negative effects on the urban economy and economic growth. The Karnataka Chief Minister is already worrying out loud along these lines, and the best response for him will not be to force migrant workers to stay put, but to focus on their economic concerns and stability so that workers will voluntarily wish to work in his State.

We cannot let the foundations of economic growth go barren, which they will if we ignore the migrant workers, and the poor in general, who make a large demand and labour base for the economy. 

The pandemic also offers an opportunity to build new systems of governance that will significantly improve its effectiveness. At the Central level, a Ministry of Migrant Welfare can be set up that will have the necessary funds and coordinating power to help domestic immigrants. Just as the Ministry of External Affairs is the single point of contact for Indian migrants living abroad, a ministry of migrant welfare would be the single contact point for domestic immigrants.

The Central ministry will need a decentralised machinery at the city level to provide support to migrants. Many volunteers and civic groups are actively helping migrant workers today during lockdown. Such a decentralised machinery could comprise bureaucrats from the host States as well as volunteers and civic organisations from migrant and local communities. This proposed ministry’s role would be to conduct large migrant surveys, taking stock of their welfare systems, employment terms and collect aggregate statistics on inter-State migration.

Emphatic leadership needed

Announcing the national lockdown in India was a bold decision. It showcased a good model of Centre-State cooperation. Such cooperation required leadership. The economic and governance solutions to help India’s migrant workers — who form the foundation of our economy — require decisive, detailed and bold leadership as well, where the Central government needs to step up and take the lead, and State governments must actively participate. 

What the government and the broader ruling class must also understand is that migrant workers are not just bodies, they are human beings too, with full economic, social, and political rights and dignity as enshrined to all of us. So when the question arises — to whom does the migrant belong? The answer is, they belong to nobody but to themselves, just like all of us. 

Nobody owns them, or can take them for granted, and their plight is all our collective responsibility. If we forfeit this responsibility, their plight will become our destiny too.

Age of human dignity

Tradition, rationality and beyond

PRATEEK RAJ, 31 January 2020, Deccan Herald

A traditional society revers the wisdom of ancestors. In the earliest period of human history, the pace of growth was slow, and traditions—or received wisdom from ancestors—were good pointers on how one should behave. Not all traditions were fair. Some, like the caste system or feudalism, were atrocious. But in an era when change was slow, these traditions (good or bad) were persistent.

When technologies such as the printing press in Europe or lithography in India emerged in the early modern period, they became important mass communication technologies, that enabled diffusion of new ideas. Technological and economic progress gathered speed with new inventions and technology, and the lives of people transformed within generations. Hence, traditions passed on through the generations were no longer good guides of behaviour in this rapidly changing world. 

While Asian civilizations were at the helm of progress for much of human history, Europe began to catch up in the modern age. Economic historian Joel Mokyr says that the key difference between early modern Europe and elsewhere was the former’s lack of reverence toward ancestors. As Europeans travelled in the age of exploration, and read ancient books, they discovered the gaps in knowledge of their ancestors. They began to question ancestral wisdom, and believing that their generation may well be smarter and wiser than those past. In place of tradition, people began to think for themselves, individually, and began relying on their rational faculty.

Of course, the ancient world had no dearth of rational thinkers. In Hindu traditions, two of the six schools — Nyaya and Vaisheshika relied heavily on logic to learn about reality. But in traditional societies, such logical schools faced tough competition from schools that relied on rituals and traditions, where testimony was highly valued. In the modern age, testimony from ancient texts and ancestors was given much less credibility than testimony of peers and inferences of one’s own mind. That inevitably gave rise to the scientific method.

Stalwarts like Newton and Darwin revolutionized human understanding of the world around us with the scientific method. But with such ‘enlightenment’ and rationality came dark realities. As Europeans became more technologically advanced, they left a trail of exploitation around the world. India faced several famines during colonial misrule. The unchecked power of European technological superiority was especially devastating for ordinary Europeans themselves as they fought two cataclysmic world wars.

The Nazis, fuelled by pseudoscientific ideas of a Darwinian race war, perpetrated unspeakable atrocities, including the Holocaust that systematically killed millions of Jews. So, the age of rationality, despite its ability to bring rapid technological and economic progress, reached a nauseating conclusion in World War 2, characterized by devastation, genocide and moral bankruptcy on a scale unheard of in human history. 

Nazism was a natural side-effect of the age of rationality, which did not value human dignity. Consider the founder of modern statistics, Francis Galton. He was a polymathic genius who gave the world regression and fingerprints. But he was also the founder of eugenics, and believed human races were inherently different, and like breeds of animals, each race had unique characteristics that were hard baked by nature. With eugenics, the Nazis wanted to design a better race using ‘scientific principles’, while pre-selecting without basis the Nordic-Aryan as the ideal race to work upon. In the name of such improvement of racial stock, “impure”, “inferior”, “defective” or “deviant” groups were killed in gas chambers in a highly bureaucratic and organised operation.

While the Nazi obsession with purity may seem like a perversion, such ideas of group superiority were not exclusive to the age of rationality. Traditional societies were far from egalitarian. Gender, religious and caste discrimination were rampant in such societies for long, with fetishized notions of purity and pollution playing an important role in regulating conduct. 

The 20th century saw a rapid expansion in human rights. World War 2 could not have been won without the contribution of armies people of colour and of factories run by women. After the end of WW2, there was greater reflection on the perils of Nazi-type ideologies that failed to acknowledge human dignity. In the 20th century, the women’s suffrage movement, civil rights, Dalit, LGBT and the several independence movements, most prominently in India, brought representation to marginalised groups.

As marginalised voices became more salient, reason in itself was no longer an appropriate guide for decision-making. It had to be coupled with the notion of dignity, and our social systems evolved gradually to reflect this change. The notion of ‘men’ in the American Constitution, evolved from including only land-owning white men in the 18th century, to all humans in the 21st. The Indian Constitution, especially its preamble, was one of the few masterpieces of this emerging age of dignity that reflected this concern for universal dignity at a time when even its elder cousin, the American Constitution, still did not acknowledge full equality. It was a Gandhian, Martin Luther King Jr, who led the American Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and shaped the United States as a “more perfect union.”

In traditional societies, everyone had a “proper” place. Consider the position of transgenders in Indian society. While being a transgender was tolerated, and at times transgenders were even worshipped, the social and economic roles they could take were limited. As societies became more rational, it did not spontaneously create an inclusive society. Labelling of “proper” and “improper” humans became common. For example, in Victorian England, the rights of LGBT persons were severely curtailed, and anti-LGBT laws and sentiments diffused in other colonies. However, in the modern era, both rationality and tradition are tested on the anvil of human dignity, offering natural rights to all people in participative and democratic systems of collective decision-making. 

The ideals of such a society are codified in great constitutional texts such as the American and the Indian constitutions. Though these constitutions codify great and noble ideas and are great achievements of mankind, the application of these ideas nonetheless depends on those who practice and apply them in their daily lives. Do we give primacy to human dignity, and test our traditions and rationality on that anvil? Or are we comfortable in defending our traditions or reasoning even when they violate the dignity of fellow human beings? The answers to these questions will decide the fate of our society in the long run.

Reimagining India in economic clusters to boost growth

PRATEEK RAJ, 14 October 2019, Deccan Herald

We live in times of uneven growth where some parts of India have grown phenomenally while other parts have stunted. Neither an abstract India-level policy nor a state/district level policy is appropriate for achieving rapid and balanced economic growth.

For a large country with 135 crore people, national-level policies have a limited ability in stimulating local growth evenly, as local growth depends largely on local conditions. Similarly, district or city-level policies may understand local conditions better, but they fail to utilise the synergies of the broader region.

Instead of a national, provincial, district or city level perspective, India should identify and develop multiple regional economic clusters centered around its many cities. This approach not only encourages urban development, but it also promotes the development of surrounding rural areas, by promoting the production of value-added and specialised products and services in the hinterland, marketable for a global economy.

Taking a cluster-level view can make the development and governance of India more manageable — organised into smaller self-governing economic units.

Within the country, there already exists a salient template in the form of the Delhi NCR region, which since 1985 has been planned by the National Capital Region Planning Board (NCRPB) as a “unique example of inter-state regional planning and development” aimed to “promote balanced and harmonised development of the Region, and to avoid any haphazard development.”

The success of this governance model is visible from the fact that surrounding cities aspire to get the Delhi NCR tag to attract investment, as evidenced from the recent request of four Rajasthan cities to be officially a part of the Delhi NCR region.

The pearl river delta economic zone of China is a globally cited example of a highly successful economic cluster. The region has also benefited from an early experience of being a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) with more relaxed regulations and taxation. Today the region holds an indispensable position in the global supply chains.

An international think tank, GaWC classifies cities on the basis of their centrality to the global economy. London and New York are called alpha ++ cities as they are at the pinnacle of the global economy.

It also classifies 53 other cities as alpha cities that connect important economic regions to the world. Only two Indian cities get included: Mumbai and Delhi.

At a level below; it also classifies 80 beta cities that connect secondary economic regions. Only two other Indian cities make the list: Bengaluru and Chennai. In contrast, GaWC classifies four Chinese cities as alpha (including two in the pearl river delta economic zone alone), and thirteen Chinese cities as beta. The difference between India and China could not be starker.

India needs to develop more alpha and beta level cities which will be at the heart of economic clusters that will include smaller towns/villages, together producing globally valuable products and services.

Some government initiatives like the development of economic corridors across the country (between Mumbai and Delhi) are encouraging but they need to be expanded in regions that are currently facing a metropolis vacuum, such as the Hindi heartland (Lucknow-Kanpur, Allahabad-Varanasi, Dhanbad-Bokaro), or the North East (Guwahati-Nagaon).

Similarly, Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) has initiated an MSME cluster development program where closely situated enterprises producing similar goods or services, will be identified and provided targeted support, at individual and cluster level.

Such an initiative has great potential and needs to be scaled up (from enterprise clusters to economic clusters) and placed at the heart of India’s development policy.

Similarly, the smart city mission is another encouraging step, but the mission’s focus remains at a city level and lacks a cluster level perspective. The smart city mission focuses on new infrastructure projects and their smooth planning and execution by a special purpose vehicle.

However, we need policies that go beyond and can improve the quality of everyday urban governance. In the absence of good urban governance, a poor urban environment (pollution in Delhi, or traffic congestion in Bengaluru) may lead to lost global economic opportunities for the cities.

The cluster level of view economic governance will require new types of local leadership. The current local leadership and governance are vertically diffused.

Hence, when river water floods Patna or Mumbai, everyone in the hierarchy — from the chief minister to local bureaucrats — is held accountable for the failure in the area.

Such vertical diffusion of accountability and power leads to confusion and hampers the ability of local governments to plan and take decisions. We need clarity.

Hence, we need empowered and accountable mayors and local governments, that can raise revenue, enact new laws, and respond promptly to the local conditions without frequent interference.

Economic cluster

The decentralisation of power at the local level also needs to be coupled with more coordination between different local governments of an economic cluster.

The higher levels of the government play a limited role here in facilitating and coordinating between different local governments.

Clearly defined responsibilities and powers of local governments can ensure that higher levels of government play a coordinating role, without undue interference.

India has been traditionally organised along geographic and not economic lines. Our economic clusters, however, span across multiple administrative divisions.

We need a better way to tap the synergies between these divisions, by empowering the local governments and relying on decentralisation and coordination to achieve focussed, rapid and balanced economic growth.

South India’s growth model is worth emulating

The region knows how trade and tolerance need each other for progress. A mix of market policies and welfarism is on offer

PRATEEK RAJ and SHRUTHI MOHAN MENON, 14 September 2019, Hindu Business Line

The southern States of India present a unique model of development. They have become the country’s economic engine and the bastions of social progress. The region attracts multinational IT (services) and automobile (manufacturing) firms while remaining the spice capital (agriculture) of the world. The average per capita income in the five southern States is three times that of Uttar Pradesh and about five times Bihar’s.

Beyond economic growth, the States have also undergone social progress as the status of women and Dalits today is better in the region. The gender ratio is more balanced in the South, the fertility rate is lower, and the region has been more successful in eliminating untouchability. The world needs to applaud this progress of South India.

To understand the model of growth — which is inclusive and people-centric — one needs to recognise the trade-oriented and cosmopolitan history of South India. The region had bustling ports like Calicut and Cochin. It was also home to some of the largest cities of the world, including Madurai and Vijayanagar. These ports and cities attracted traders from around the world, which meant religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam reached the region early.

This unique amalgamation led to the South being home to some of the most majestic Hindu temples, as well as some of the world’s oldest churches and mosques. Few other regions of the world, if any, can boast of such a cosmopolitan history.

Trade and tolerance

Through its various trade and cultural contacts throughout history, the South has developed a culture where trade and tolerance are viewed as complements for progress — where a prosperous neighbour is good for one’s own prosperity. Such a cosmopolitan view of the world is fundamentally at odds with a parochial world view that looks at progress as a form of war between “us” and “them”.

So, the region’s culture is less parochial with a greater emphasis on egalitarian values, which also got reflected in the many social reform movements in the early 20th century. This legacy has been carried forward through the inclusive model of growth. Modern cities like Bengaluru and Hyderabad reflect this well, by being the land of opportunity for people from across India.

In post-liberalisation India, there exists a consensus that an investment-friendly climate is important for growth, but some models of development focus on just growth and regard social progress as a by-product. But even relatively rich States like Gujarat still suffer from poor gender ratios and untouchability, and the lack of social progress threatens their success. In the South Indian model, there is a dual focus — on pro-market policies (that attract private investment), and public investments for inclusion and social progress. In this approach, free markets that can promise opportunity are emphasised, and governments play an important role as referees and providers of public goods and justice, focussing on development of sustainable economic clusters.

Policymakers often pursue either a market model or a redistribution model — focussing on public spending at the cost of private investment. Neither approaches can achieve the “virtuous growth” the policymakers wish to achieve, as we need to balance both.

Critics of the South Indian model point out that it is not a runaway success. The region suffers from an acute water crisis, corruption remains endemic, and Tamil Nadu and Kerala have achieved greater social progress and greater levels of prosperity than the other States in the region. Not all southern States are equally open to reforms either, and some like Kerala are criticised for being unfriendly to doing business. However, these within-region differences aside, the marked difference between the South and the rest of India in development indicators is difficult to ignore.

South India has much to offer as it has a growth model that not only makes doing business easy but also makes the economy and the market more inclusive for all. It is progress driven by enlightened ideas, which are rooted in India’s oldest traditions. Hence, national conversation needs to move a little South, and for this, India needs a united, not divided, representation from the region.

By offering a new narrative of inclusive progress — for example, lessons from Tamil Nadu on public health systems (Dasgupta et. al., 2010) — South India has the potential to reinvigorate India. In the early 20th century, Travancore led radical social reforms — like opening temple entry to all and promoting primary education — that fundamentally altered the course of Indian history. In the 21st century, India needs inspiration from the South once again. 

We Need to Deal With WhatsApp's Misinformation Problem

A peculiar feature of WhatsApp groups has made the spread of misinformation much easier. We need better design guidelines for platforms like WhatsApp, ones that can curb disinformation without infringing on user privacy. 

PRATEEK RAJ, 8 July 2019, ProMarket

In the 2019 Indian elections, the country’s national parties aggressively used digital platforms, especially WhatsApp, to spread their message with help from an army of dedicated volunteers. The sophistication of their campaigns—which involved the formation of curated groups using data analytics—was described by a former data analyst for India’s governing party (BJP) thus: “Cambridge Analytica probably couldn’t even dream of this level of targeted advertising.”

The Indian elections were plagued by misinformation and divisiveness. This was part of an emerging trend: Over the years, rumors and xenophobia have become endemic to WhatsApp and other online platforms. At least 31 people in India have been killed in 2017 and 2018 as a result of lynch mob attacks fueled by rumors on WhatsApp and other social media, a BBC analysis has found. Wikipedia even dedicated an entire page to “Indian WhatsApp lynchings.” In Myanmar, both Facebook and WhatsApp have been used as weapons for spreading hate against ethnic Muslim minorities. While the role of Facebook in Myanmar’s violence was widely reported in the United States, WhatsApp’s role was largely ignored.

We cannot ignore it any longer.

Facebook has been under considerable scrutiny from policymakers, the press, and academic scholars in the United States and Europe in recent years. Its subsidiary WhatsApp, however, gets significantly less attention in the United States, despite being a massive platform with over 1.6 billion active users worldwide. With Mark Zuckerberg laying out a new vision for Facebook, one centered around encrypted conversations and modeled after WhatsApp, it may be a good time for Americans to start paying attention to WhatsApp, which presents its own complicated set of challenges for policymakers and regulators.

The rationale behind Facebook’s plan to shift focus toward encrypted messaging is, in part, to sidestep regulation. So far, Facebook and other digital platforms have been protected from being liable for the content published on their platforms thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which protects internet companies from being held accountable for the content their users generate or share. But with growing bipartisan support for increased oversight and regulation of Facebook and other tech platforms, and with so much public scrutiny of divisive content spread through social media, that protected status might change. Unable (or unwilling) to control the stream of fake news and disinformation on its platforms, Facebook seems to be making a reasonable strategic choice to shift toward the WhatsApp model.

Every conversation on WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, and neither WhatsApp, the carriers, nor governments can observe the private conversations between users. End-to-end encryption is an important service that digital platforms can offer to ensure more privacy for users, particularly when it comes to civic activists. In the US, where WhatsApp is less popular, Americans tend to prefer texting through other messaging services like Apple’s iMessage. iMessage is also end-to-end encrypted, but differs substantially from WhatsApp, in that the latter allows the creation of large groups where users can converse in an encrypted environment. In Latin America, Europe and elsewhere, these groups are a common way for users to receive news and updates, which cannot be moderated by WhatsApp due to its encrypted nature. In recent years, this has allowed malicious actors to spread disinformation and fake news stories through the app.

A peculiar feature of WhatsApp groups has made the spread of misinformation through the platform much easier: As a default option, any WhatsApp user can add another user to a group without that user’s consent, as long as they have their contact information. Until recently, this was the only option WhatsApp users had, which meant that if you had a contact who is a member with admin rights of a group that occasionally posts extremist content, they could add you to the group without your consent. You could, of course, exit the group after being added, but exiting any group displays a public message that says the user has left. Such a design, where users can be added to a group involuntarily, gives rise to large groups with many passive members who inactively consume content shared by more active, louder members.

These features of WhatsApp—the way groups are formed and exited—are seemingly innocuous, but they can have a large impact on how fast information spreads in the platform. Policymakers need to understand these nuances, and lately, the economics profession has been waking up to the accelerating pace of information diffusion. Nobel laureate Robert Shiller, for instance, has suggested studying it through epidemiological models, such as the Kermack-McKindrick SIR model, which models the rate in which infectious diseases spread.

How does the presence of large groups with many passive users influence the epidemiology of information? The fact that WhatsApp makes it easy to add members to large groups without consent could be exploited by interest groups, such as political actors or governments, who seek to spread propaganda and disinformation. As long as an interest group has a small number of dedicated WhatsApp “volunteers” (the “infectives”) who can expose a large number of users (the “susceptibles”) to their message with each forward by targeting users in large WhatsApp groups, misinformation can quickly and virally spread across WhatsApp like an epidemic with little accountability. Apple’s iMessage, despite also being end-to-end encrypted, does not support large groups and is therefore not used as a tool for spreading misinformation. 

The design features that help spread misinformation through large WhatsApp groups have already led to dangerous consequences, as cases of violence in Brazil, India, and Myanmar demonstrate. Following these disturbances, WhatsApp has begun to tweak its design to limit the spread of misinformation. For example, forwarded messages on WhatsApp now appear with the label “forwarded,” and the latest update can provide users with additional statistics. Similarly, users can now only forward a message five times. However, as WhatsApp has learned, these tweaks are not enough to tackle strategically-motivated misinformants who can make minor changes to their forwarded messages to sidestep these restrictions. WhatsApp now offers users the option of restricting who can add them to a group and the ability to refuse before being added to a group by a stranger. Yet, the default option for WhatsApp continues to be the one where users can add any other user to a group without their explicit consent, nudging users towards an ecosystem that is still conducive to the spread of misinformation.

Digital platforms have an incentive to maintain an ecosystem where information goes viral, despite the considerable negative externalities of such virality. While WhatsApp should not become the censor of information, it can nonetheless do a lot more to ensure that its users do not get bombarded with misinformation by making more responsible architecture design choices that take into account the epidemiology of information. The media, policymakers, and users should push the company in that direction as well.

Due to safety concerns, countries like India have recently begun to demand that WhatsApp change its encryption to enable the tracing of specific messages, but doing so would infringe on user privacy, which as a principle should be protected. A better way to curb the spread of misinformation on WhatsApp without sacrificing user privacy would be to develop design guidelines, particularly regarding how such messaging apps should handle the formation, entry, and exit of groups, given the key role these groups play in the epidemiology of information. For example, a regulation that requires WhatsApp-like apps to set default privacy settings that maximize user privacy (e.g., requiring consent before adding users to groups) could be an effective move.

We need to bring accountability and facts back to the public conversation, but there is no one-size-fits-all policy that will be appropriate for all digital platforms. As the WhatsApp model seems to be Facebook’s preferred model for the future, it is important for policymakers to appreciate how the regulatory solutions that may make sense for Facebook (more moderation) may not work for WhatsApp and could be counterproductive for privacy rights. Meanwhile, until regulators figure this out, better design guidelines and rules can help curb the spread of misinformation and nudge users toward creating a more informed internet.

A Brief History of the Marketplace for Ideas

PRATEEK RAJ, 26 June 2019, Milken Institute Review

Good policy should emerge from a clear-eyed view of the facts. Yet the U.S. seems to be moving away from this ideal, even in areas grounded in hard science, such as the public health benefits of vaccinations, the safety of GMO foods and the need to address climate change. People, it turns out, have different ideas about the facts.

Indeed, the deepening chasms among beliefs of how American institutions should govern seem to have nothing to do with facts and everything to do with the stories told by people in power. Now, more than ever, social scientists should be focused on how we arrived here.

The Marketplace for Ideas

Bear with me while I offer a different way of thinking about the social sciences. Information and ideas can be viewed as complements that together create understanding about the world. Information in itself is a lump of facts (data or otherwise). Understanding develops when information is organized in a specific order that follows a set of rules (a model). A starry night sky is a collection of dots for the untrained eye, but for astronomers the color, intensity and movement of those dots tell us about the universe.

These models or mental representations are ideas that shape how we process information. By influencing how we perceive information and reach an understanding, ideas inform our actions. If two people have adopted different ideas, they can reach a different understanding and hence take different actions — even if they receive the same information.

For example, if you believe that the Earth is flat, then you will look at the sunset and have a very different understanding of the phenomenon than a college physics major informed by the past 400 years of scientific ideas. Hence, ideas can be a source of heterogeneity in how people behave, and they are increasingly of interest to economists.

While information can be transmitted in bits, ideas are mental representations that can be conceptualized like products competing in a marketplace. And most economists have neglected that one marketplace.

Economic historians including Deirdre McCloskey (University of Illinois) and Joel Mokyr (Northwestern) are exceptions, emphasizing the importance of ideas in creating the modern world. Mokyr’s book Culture of Growth lays out a vision of culture as a menu of ideas in which entrepreneurs compete in a marketplace to add new ideas to the menu. Some cultural entrepreneurs succeed more than others in this regard, and a rare few like Buddha, Muhammad, Einstein and Newton are disruptively successful in bringing about a paradigm change.

Ideas, of course, are not products competing on price. The value of an idea is opaque before it gets adopted by the public. Hence, the public can know whether the idea can create useful understanding only by adopting it. To motivate people to adopt an idea, a cultural entrepreneur needs to be persuasive — a storyteller with a narrative for their audience. McCloskey emphasized the role of rhetoric in economics. Mokyr gave a central role to persuasion in conceptualizing the marketplace of ideas, writing that “in this market people try to persuade an audience of the correctness of their beliefs and the merit of their values and to provide information to others who do not have it.”

Narratives as the Face of Ideas

To understand how ideas propagate, Robert Shiller has emphasized the role of narratives. He argues that memes and their contagions should be treated seriously and systematically when attempting to understand an economic phenomenon. 

Narratives are different from ideas because they go beyond being mental representations of the world. They are stories, rich with emotive symbols and abstractions. Hence, they can be persuasive and contagious. For example, the Laffer Curve is a simple inverted U-shaped line, first drawn (according to the myth) on a cocktail napkin. It illustrates that, when tax rates exceed some specified level, government revenues actually fall because people have no incentive at the margin to work or invest.

The Laffer Curve is perfect cocktail party kindling to spark a conversation on taxes. As Shiller notes, the Laffer Curve helped in propagating the ideas of limited government and low taxes during and after the Reagan era.

Narratives are thus the gateways to ideas that can attract an audience’s attention. They have become more consequential over time because the marketplace of ideas has become ever more competitive.

The Supply of New Narratives

Traditional societies generally revered the wisdom of their ancestors. In the pre-modern world, the pace of change was slow, and ideas encapsulated in the form of narratives passed almost intact from generation to generation. These were good mental representations for understanding a relatively stable world. In a recent paper, Paola Giuliano of UCLA’s business school and Nathan Nunn of Harvard found that populations with ancestors who lived in more stable environments place greater importance in maintaining tradition today and also exhibit more persistence in their traditions over time.

A period of major disruption began in the 1450s, with Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type printing press. In the world before fast, flexible printing, information and ideas flowed vertically from parents to children, priests to congregations, teachers to students, lords to subjects.

Gutenberg opened the possibility of mass diffusion of information and ideas, packaged as narratives. The printing press radically expanded the scope in which horizontal diffusion of information could occur far faster and wider than sharing stories in churches, coffee shops and bazaars. Books that were once accessible only in a handful of libraries were now available in print en masse to the public. There was a mushrooming of new narratives, many of which deviated from incumbent ideas in the market.

The 95 Theses, which may have become the most famous pamphlet ever, was posted in October 1517 by a relatively unknown priest (Martin Luther), and its critique of the Catholic Church went viral. While Luther’s ideas on Christian faith were broad, he focused on one issue in his pamphlet: the Church’s selling of indulgences. Within months, the pamphlet had been reprinted and shared throughout Europe, triggering what was known as the Protestant Reformation that created a permanent chasm within Christianity.

In contrast, in India, printing technology was not adopted during the 15th and 16th centuries. There were prominent reformist Bhakti movements under way during the period, but they could not gain the transformational scale of the Protestant Reformation. The Indian languages did not have an alphabetic script, and the resin-based lithographic printing suitable for printing the hybrid Indian abugida script was only invented at the end of the 18th century. But once lithography was introduced to India in the early 19th century, it did lead to a rise in printing in local languages that coincided with the rise of nationalist and social reformist movements in India.

The Demand for New Narratives

Expansion of the supply of information driven by new technologies is a necessary but insufficient condition for disruption in the marketplace for ideas. Printing had been invented in China several centuries earlier than in Europe, but it failed to make an impact on a similar scale (which, admittedly, may have been due in part to China’s logographic script). Even within Europe, not all parts were equally transformed. Italy was the epicenter of Renaissance ideas. But it wasn’t transformed to the same degree as it was in northwestern Europe, which became the cradle of “bourgeois culture.” Northwestern Europe as a region was uniquely suited for change, as it was hit not only by a supply shock of the printing revolution but also by a demand shock of discovery of new sea routes.

New narratives are more persuasive when they promise a better understanding of the world. The late 15th century saw another disruption in Europe: the discovery of new sea routes to other continents. The contact of Europe with the rest of the world significantly expanded trade and brought new goods and experiences. In his book Matters of Exchange, Harold Cook of Brown University argues that as the Dutch traveled in the age of exploration, they discovered gaps in the knowledge of their ancestors. As material conditions changed with expansion in trade, the traditional wisdom that had passed from ancestors was no longer sufficient.

One key difference between early modern Europe and elsewhere, according to Mokyr, was the lack of reverence for ancestors. Europeans, especially those most transformed by the age of exploration, began to believe their own generations may be smarter and wiser than the past. When this break with tradition took place, something was needed to replace the guidance it offered. Hence, there emerged a demand for new ideas and an opportunity for new cultural entrepreneurs.

What This Means for Us

The modern world is distinguished from the past because the material realities of the world transform within a generation. The process of rapid change that began in northwestern Europe in the 16th century is in full swing today around the world. And with the rise of the internet in the past few decades, the demand for, and supply of, information has once again been disrupted. So, we find ourselves in an age of disruption.

Predicting winners in this contemporary marketplace of ideas is difficult. The 2016 U.S. elections were testimony to its unpredictability: against the odds, Donald Trump’s colorful MAGA narrative won the day over Hillary Clinton’s wonkish policy-driven narrative.

If social scientists — including economists — aim to contribute to understanding this age of disruption, they first need to acknowledge how central narratives are for the propagation of the ideas through which people perceive their reality. We need to think of ideas in terms of a marketplace, and conceptualize their supply and demand, and their propagation through narratives. Once narratives become regular features of social science, we will be in a better position to understand how people actually behave.

Real Indian priorities that politics does not prioritize

PRATEEK RAJ, 19 June 2019, Mint

Around three months ago, I got a chance to peer through the thoughts and preferences of around 270,000 Indian voters across India through a survey that was painstakingly collected by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) in December 2018. I had anticipated gaining an in-depth understanding of the wants and needs of different Indian voters, expecting that Indians had varying priorities, given the size and the diversity of the country.

The results of the survey were surprising. India speaks in one voice when it comes to the country’s top issues and concerns. Indians want jobs. Beyond jobs, they want better healthcare and better access to drinking water, better roads and public transport as well.

Urban India has some specific priorities that relate to a desire for better urban governance: less traffic, better provision for pedestrians and cyclists, less air-, water-, and noise pollution, and a better urban environment. Rural India’s concerns overwhelmingly relate to faster growth in the agricultural sector: better availability of water and electricity for agriculture, access to loans and subsidies, and better price realisation in markets.

Surprisingly, among the issues that appear to be low on people’s list of priorities are the emotive hot-button ones: issues such as corruption, reservations, and terrorism. More than these, local issues of law and order, policing, and women’s safety matter more to voters. I learnt from studying this extensive survey that India is united on several issues and deeply cares about substantive ones that relate to the everyday life of the common man. This is excellent news. However, such a universal desire for a politics of substance does not necessarily translate into actual politics of substance.

In strategy classes, we teach Master of Business Administration (MBA) students that in a competitive environment, a strategic advantage is gained through differentiation. This is true in politics, too. On economic issues, voters and political parties in India appear to be broadly on the same page. There is a consensus that India at this moment needs rapid reforms, infrastructure investments and effective welfare spending to propel inclusive economic growth.

If Indian political parties offer similar economic ideas, then how can they differentiate themselves from each other? This is where hot-button issues, the ones that voters actually do not prioritize, begin to gather salience. Different demographic groups respond differently to hot-button issues. So, they gain disproportionately more salience in politics as a means through which political parties can set themselves apart.

Consider the issue of reservations. Parties can differentiate themselves to voters of different demographic groups by strategically supporting some communities for quotas. So, while political parties debate who gets which quota in tertiary education, less attention is paid to fixing something more urgent and important—the quality of and access to primary education.

Given a competitive political environment, the choice of controversial candidates and divisive rhetoric on hot-button issues in pursuit of differentiation is a feature of politics, not a glitch. The key challenge for voters is how a politics of substance, which tackles the everyday issues of Indian voters, can get the air time it deserves. The solution has to begin with the recognition that all Indians actually want similar things. On this, they are not as divided.

The solution also requires the cooperation of the media, and aggressive efforts from viewers to demand the broadcast of substantial issues during prime time. An analysis of associated keywords of Twitter hashtags promoted by Republic TV prime-time debates since 15 March showed that words relating to jobs, water or healthcare did not find any salience.

We need to focus on the everyday needs of Indians today. The Indian economy is growing fast, but it is not growing fast enough. Our neighbour China has an economy that is five times the size of India’s today. Such a lack of balance in economic, and consequently, military power is perilous for India’s security and sovereignty. We need rapid economic growth to compete with China, which can only happen if Indians begin to focus on local needs for economic growth.

How can India achieve growth if 600 million Indians face an acute water crisis? Indians consistently prioritize the issue of availability of water, as the ADR survey shows, and it remains the top issue in states such as Karnataka. Where was this issue on the priority list of politicians and how often did the media engage in a discussion on how to fix it during the elections?

Today, west and south India have achieved rapid economic growth, but north India’s Hindi heartland still remains largely stagnant. How can India achieve fast and sustainable growth if the region does not grow, if the future of its children is not insured, and politicians are prioritizing religion or culture?

As Indians, we need to distinguish issues that actually matter from issues that do not. At this moment in history, we cannot condone politicians who distract us with divisive hot-button issues that cannot be our priority. Our priorities are clear to all and are universally acknowledged. At this cusp of progress, India cannot afford to lose its focus.

Hindi heartland needs an urban revolution

To reduce outward migration, cities in UP and Bihar must turn into growth engines. Municipalities have a key role to play

PRATEEK RAJ, 13 March 2019, Hindu Business Line

Over the last month, the world saw a unique spectacle in India’s Hindi heartland as tens of millions of people across India and the world, gathered at Kumbh in Prayagraj. Organising Kumbh is unique feat in urban planning and management. Yet, will this impressive organisational ability be translated into improving the quality of Indian cities?

This question of urban growth and planning shall be central to India’s development policy over the coming decades. Here’s why.

Prayagraj or Allahabad is no ordinary city. It lies at the heart of India symbolised by the confluence of India’s two mighty North Indian rivers — Ganga and Yamuna. Before the time of the Buddha, the region formed the Vatsa mahajanpada, flanked by other influential mahajanpadas such as Kashi, Kosala, Magadha and Panchala. Even during the British rule, the city was the heart of India’s freedom struggle and literary renaissance. Yet, the city couldn’t keep up with the progress of rest of India, and could symbolically represent the decline of the entire Hindi speaking region.

Metropolis vacuum

The Hindi speaking provinces: Uttar Pradesh (UP), Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh (MP) together make a population close to half a billion. Historically, the region’s fertile plains supported important cosmopolitan cities of the world, like Kashi and Patliputra. Just over a hundred years ago, four of the 10 largest cities (Lucknow, Banares, Kanpur and Agra), and eight of the 20 largest cities in India (+ Allahabad, Patna, Bareilly and Meerut) were in the region (1911 census). But today, the region suffers from a “metropolis vacuum”, because it has no major metropolitan agglomeration to attract talent and investments. The six largest cities of India, — Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad — all lie outside of this Hindi heartland. The other new upcoming urban centres such as Pune, Ahmedabad, and Surat also lie outside of the region.

Among the 10 largest cities none are in the region, while only five cities (Lucknow, Kanpur, Indore, Bhopal and Patna) belong in the top 20 (2011 census). The glaring absence of a major metropolitan centre in the region has forced young people to migrate from the small towns and move to other cities in the West and the South.

Firing from all cylinders

After liberalisation, while growth in the south and the west took off and cities such as Bengaluru and Hyderabad found spectacular success, leaving behind the Hindi heartland. However, it cannot be left out any longer.

Today, India needs sustained double digit economic growth, to fulfil the aspirations of its highly ambitious and very young population. To achieve such growth the Hindi heartland needs to become an engine of growth too. Lopsided regional growth centred in the South and the West cannot lift the whole country. Can such growth happen in the absence of a metropolitan anchor in the Hindi heartland?

Beyond the central government, State governments and even more so, the local mayors and their municipal councils, are key players in shaping the direction of India’s development. If the Hindi heartland is to grow, it needs local governments that appreciate the centrality of cities in economic growth.

Recently, India has made plans to develop industrial corridors connecting its major cities. At the same time, it has also focused its efforts on the smart city mission which develops special local organisations (called “Special Purpose Vehicles”) that has the authority to “plan, appraise, approve, release funds, implement, manage, operate, monitor and evaluate the Smart City development projects” (Smart City Mission 2018).

This is an exciting innovation, as it fixes accountability and improves urban governance by empowering local administrations (CEOs). Yet, more needs to be done.

Fixing urban governance

Currently, Indian cities suffer from severe handicaps due to poor urban governance (Janagraha ASICS 2017). Cities around the world, from London to Chicago have influential mayors, and residents hold them responsible if the city fails to function well.

While CEO-led special purpose vehicles are a welcome step of the Smart City Mission, ideally Indian cities need empowered mayors and municipal councils, which should be the primary executive and legislative authority on matters related to their city’s funding, development and management.

Today, when heavy rain clogs cities like Patna, who is to be held accountable? The government of Bihar which represents a hundred million people, or a local mayor? The answer to this question should be clear, so that we can stop passing the buck.

With correct urban governance, unique events such as the Kumbh can catalyse growth in the hosting cities. An influx of development projects, funds and media attention, can be the timely impetus a city like Allahabad needs.

Allahabad and its neighbour, Varanasi, should have been a major economic agglomeration already, attracting young migrants from around the country and the world to its many universities and organisations.

Alas, this is not the case. But now promotion of urban centres in the Hindi heartland (like Lucknow-Kanpur region, Allahabad-Varanasi region, Patna region) needs to be done with utmost urgency. Targeted steps to rejuvenate cities of Hindi heartland are a win-win for all stakeholders in India’s growth. If metropolitan cities can emerge in the region, it will relieve the migratory pressures many growing cities like Bengaluru are facing today.

Here is the bottom-line: Of the 1.35 billion people of India, about half a billion cannot be left behind. So, India’s Hindi heartland needs an urban revolution.