Bibek Debroy Quotes

• “Deep and liquid markets in a country’s domestic economy are the essential shock absorbers through which the perilous waters of international financial integration can be navigated.”

  Bibek Debroy

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• “Achieving such deep and liquid markets requires large-scale financial sector reforms, with a complete replacement of the existing regulatory framework.”

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• “Differences
  in morbidity, mortality, and nutritional status linked to differences in
  socioeconomic status, caste, class, gender, and geography persist in India.”

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• “India’s success in building a modern state that defied predictions of its demise derived from its thorough insistence on institutionalizing what was Mahatma Gandhi’s greatest bequest to the freedom movement: the construction of a new Indian nation, not by suppressing its many particularities but by incorporating them into a new composite identity that preserved in “marble-cake” fashion all its constituent diversities across ethnic, religious, and racial lines. These diversities, far from being obliterated, acquired salience depending on context but, being enmeshed and free-flowing, they erased the boundaries between the insular and national identities, congealing the latter even as they preserved the former. The modern Indian polity, therefore, emerged not as a nation-state since, given its myriad diversities, it could not be so—but rather as a nations-state. Under the rubric of “unity in diversity,” its different ethnic, religious, and racial groups combined to create a novel, multilayered political identity. However confusing that reality may be to the outside world, it is
  authentically and indisputably Indian.”

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• “Bhishma, has borne the great burden of the Kouravas, and with him, all that knowledge is about to set. That is the reason I am asking you to approach him.”

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• “India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and many others in the post-independence leadership—though, emphatically, not all within this cohort—deeply believed that the combination of liberal democracy, civic nationalism, and socialist economics was essential to successfully building
  a modern Indian state.”

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• “India’s primordial nationalisms—whether expressed in language, religion, caste, or even commensality—would have pulled the country apart, as happened in several other postcolonial states, had it not been for the fact that India consciously gave itself a constitutional order that incorporated
  universal franchise and the rule of law; guaranteed individual rights and a federal system that promulgated separation of powers at the center and limits on the central government’s authority over the states; and established recurring elections that tested the strength of contending political parties and endowed them with the privilege of rule for limited periods of time.
  By adopting such a framework, India enshrined the twin components that mark all real democracies: contestation, or the peaceful struggle for power through an orderly process that confirms the preferences of the polity, and participation, or the right of all adult citizens, irrespective of wealth, gender, religion, or ethnicity, to vote for a government of their choice.”

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• “India’s post-independence leadership eschewed parochial nationalism in favor of civic nationalism where the rights and privileges of being Indian were conceived as arising not from some pre-existent modes of belonging—religion, race, or ethnicity—but instead from participation in a collective political endeavor.”

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• “The affirmation that Indian democracy would be founded entirely on a shared citizenship centered on upholding liberal principles and participatory institutions rather than religion, race, or ethnicity ensured that the many particularities that might have otherwise divided India were in one fell swoop deprived of any fundamental political meaning. This did not imply that the particularities themselves ceased to exist or that they ceased
  to provoke contention. Rather, they simply ceased to be privileged attributes that endowed their possessors with either greater rights or natural
  claims on power.”

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• “For any society, two concerns are paramount—economic growth and
  improvement in the well-being of the poor. Growth is needed to finance
  redistribution. This redistribution typically takes two forms—productive
  investment, for example, the financing of infrastructure, expenditures on
  health and education, and simple transfers of income.”

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• “It is not that education has never been accorded adequate importance in India.
  The writings of the founding fathers—including Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Maulana Azad, Ambedkar, and even the spiritual torchbearers of modern India such as Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo—stressed that education would form the core of India’s “tryst with destiny,” as Jawaharlal Nehru would have put it. Almost all of them suggested ways by which a new generation of Indians could be educated in a liberal and scientific environment where modern society was built on traditional strengths, one supplementing but not substituting for the other, and where education was deeply connected to the needs of people. But somehow, independent India could not build on the richness of this philosophical tradition, or on the depth of its populace’s respect for education.
  This history seems to have been lost in the current debate, mired in the more mundane issues of access and quality defined in terms of enrollment
  numbers and teacher-student ratios.”

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• “Dropouts are only one outcome of bad quality. Poor learning outcomes, low employability of graduates, low productivity, and consequent
  low wages constitute another set of outcomes.”

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