In pursuit of development: The tale of three ‘models’

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Editor's note: For a while now, debates on development in India have been flush with suggestions of “models”. In 2014, when Narendra Modi was being prepared as India’s prime minister, a media blitzkrieg was unleashed on the so-called “Gujarat model”. The corporate sector, right-wing economists and a section of liberal writers lapped it up. Leading the pack were economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya. Their focus was to “prove” that the Gujarat model was superior to the Kerala model, of which their bête noire Amartya Sen was a votary. The “Sen-Bhagwati debate” consumed much newsprint and bandwidth in 2014. But seven years later, there is recognition that the claims on the “Gujarat model” were nothing but political rhetoric. Gujarat was just one of the many fast-growing states in India; its industrial growth was based on the covert and overt transfer of massive amounts of public resources to private corporates; its levels of poverty were unacceptably high; and its social sector record was appalling. Gujarat was nothing but an exemplar of the perils of crony capitalism. Today, no one talks of the Gujarat …