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Despite The State : Why India Lets Its People Down And How They Cope
About the Book
A LUCID, NECESSARY ACCOUNT OF HOW DRASTICALLY THE INDIAN STATE FAILS ITS CITIZENS
The story of democratic failure is usually read at the level of the nation, while the primary bulwarks of democratic functioning—the states—get overlooked. This is a tale of India’s states, of why they build schools but do not staff them with teachers; favour a handful of companies so much that others slip into losses; wage water wars with their neighbours while allowing rampant sand mining and groundwater extraction; harness citizens’ right to vote but brutally crack down on their right to dissent. Reporting from six states over thirty-three months, award-winning investigative journalist M. Rajshekhar delivers a necessary account of a deep crisis that has gone largely unexamined.
About the Author
M. Rajshekhar started his career as a business reporter in 1997. He began reporting on environmental issues as a freelance journalist in 2005. After a brief stint with the World Bank, an MA at the University of Sussex, and two years of independent research—spent studying the village-level impact of an agribusiness model in central India and the drafting process which produced India’s Forest Rights Act—he joined the Economic Times to report on rural India and environment in 2010. During this period, he won two Shriram Awards for Excellence in Financial Journalism (2013 and 2014).
He joined Scroll.in in 2015 to do a thirty-three-month-long reporting project, Ear to the Ground, which became the substrate for this book. This series won the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award (2015), the Bala Kailasam Memorial Award (2016), and two more Shriram Awards for Excellence in Financial Journalism (2015 and 2016).
He now writes on energy, environment, climate change, political corruption and oligarchy.
A LUCID, NECESSARY ACCOUNT OF HOW DRASTICALLY THE INDIAN STATE FAILS ITS CITIZENS
The story of democratic failure is usually read at the level of the nation, while the primary bulwarks of democratic functioning—the states—get overlooked. This is a tale of India’s states, of why they build schools but do not staff them with teachers; favour a handful of companies so much that others slip into losses; wage water wars with their neighbours while allowing rampant sand mining and groundwater extraction; harness citizens’ right to vote but brutally crack down on their right to dissent. Reporting from six states over thirty-three months, award-winning investigative journalist M. Rajshekhar delivers a necessary account of a deep crisis that has gone largely unexamined.
About the Author
M. Rajshekhar started his career as a business reporter in 1997. He began reporting on environmental issues as a freelance journalist in 2005. After a brief stint with the World Bank, an MA at the University of Sussex, and two years of independent research—spent studying the village-level impact of an agribusiness model in central India and the drafting process which produced India’s Forest Rights Act—he joined the Economic Times to report on rural India and environment in 2010. During this period, he won two Shriram Awards for Excellence in Financial Journalism (2013 and 2014).
He joined Scroll.in in 2015 to do a thirty-three-month-long reporting project, Ear to the Ground, which became the substrate for this book. This series won the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award (2015), the Bala Kailasam Memorial Award (2016), and two more Shriram Awards for Excellence in Financial Journalism (2015 and 2016).
He now writes on energy, environment, climate change, political corruption and oligarchy.
301 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 3, 2023
I went into this book with completely open mind and this book certainly rewarded that.
The book follows few states of India and tried to analyze why development has failed in these states and the reasons behind it. Author has done extensive research by actually visiting the states and living in them to understand situation at grass root level and this research comes through. Even the topic of the book is quite heavy, author does not ramble on about historical background but manages to explain the reason succinctly.
There are multiple flaws in Indian governance system and it has layers to it which author has managed to unravel through his research. It is of course not a comprehensive guide to how our country has led us down but it's a good introduction on flaws of the system.
The only problem I had was that author didn't supplement his own research with additional sources. Many times citations given were his own article, this is not true for everything but it is common enough that I ended up noticing it. I wish there were more citations to corroborate data collected by him. Apart from this, I felt it is a great read to understand how complex our system can be.
The book follows few states of India and tried to analyze why development has failed in these states and the reasons behind it. Author has done extensive research by actually visiting the states and living in them to understand situation at grass root level and this research comes through. Even the topic of the book is quite heavy, author does not ramble on about historical background but manages to explain the reason succinctly.
There are multiple flaws in Indian governance system and it has layers to it which author has managed to unravel through his research. It is of course not a comprehensive guide to how our country has led us down but it's a good introduction on flaws of the system.
The only problem I had was that author didn't supplement his own research with additional sources. Many times citations given were his own article, this is not true for everything but it is common enough that I ended up noticing it. I wish there were more citations to corroborate data collected by him. Apart from this, I felt it is a great read to understand how complex our system can be.
June 6, 2023
This is an analytical book about the reasons for state failure in India. As he concludes: “I slowly started to see political parties not as emissaries of regional, religious or caste-class interests but as self-interested institutions that sourced electoral power from their constituencies. In state after state, political parties seemed to share four traits: they were extractive, dominant, centralised and clientelist.”
Depressing. But insightful. We can only solve a problem when we fully understand it. That is the reason to read this book.
Depressing. But insightful. We can only solve a problem when we fully understand it. That is the reason to read this book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews