Accelerate. Include. Sustain.
We live in a time of extraordinary potential. Technology, when harnessed effectively, can radically transform societies and uplift the quality of life for billions. For India - with its cultural diversity, rich heritage, and untapped human potential - the advent of digital transformation holds remarkable promise.
Indic Acceleration represents our commitment to employ the profound power of technology and first principles for accelerating India's progress, thereby elevating our society to new heights. It is not enough to capitalize on the potential inherent in current times - we must do it in a manner that is not a mindless copy of existing playbooks. The insights from past experience and civilizational learning must be treated with the same seriousness as new ideas, all directed toward progress and growth in the real sense.
Our aim is to utilize advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, big data, and other innovations to speed up India's socio-economic growth, reduce corruption, streamline the judicial system, and encourage holistic development.
India's market liberalization in 1991 was only the beginning. We as a nation are still grappling with the spaghetti code of conduct from the central planner's era. Refactoring has only just begun. Indic Acceleration will therefore also involve research mediation, policy advocacy, and technocratic solution building - not just technology for technology's sake.
The dichotomy of degrowth versus accelerationism is a forced one. What we want is to degrow our impact on ecology, while accelerating civilization.
We need to do so sustainably - not to serve hedonistic consumerism. We must respect ecology and internalize the "externalities."
We need to do so inclusively - with as much federated ownership of capital as possible. Either bring the rate of return to parity between labor and capital, or allow labor to translate into capital ownership as early as possible.
We need to improve the velocity of money for sponsoring more opportunities to turn labor into inclusive capital - sustainably, avoiding the trap of consumerism.
We need to free the free markets from the clutches of crony consumerists, sometimes masquerading as central planners, other times as sales and marketing professionals. More transparency. More accountability.
We need to respect the uncertainty of complexity and adopt simpler, interoperable heuristics for human coordination and consensus.
Political will and technocratic infrastructure for any policy are like chicken and egg. One can manifest the other into existence for real change. Managing that change is equally crucial.
Accelerate the following metrics as holistically, inclusively, and sustainably as possible:
| Metric | Dimension | What It Measures |
|---|---|---|
| GDP Growth | Accelerate | Economic output and productive capacity |
| Gini Coefficient | Include | Income and wealth equality |
| Doughnut Metrics | Sustain | Ecological and social boundary health |
In an ideal world, these holistic metrics replace the outsized significance currently enjoyed by GDP alone. We want to align national and private capacity building toward all three north-stars simultaneously.
Mitigate the three great drags on progress:
- Corruption - through transparency infrastructure and accountability systems
- Complexity - through simpler, composable regulation and digital-first processes
- Rent-Seeking - through open markets, open data, and competitive fairness
Move forward on three fronts simultaneously:
- Sustainably - within planetary boundaries
- Inclusively - with federated ownership and broad access
- Openly - with transparent, interoperable, sovereign systems
Ensure the foundations of a functioning society:
- Trust & Safety - protect people and institutions from bad actors
- Contract Enforcement - make agreements reliable and efficient
- Timely Delivery of Justice - clear the backlog, modernize the courts
Level the playing field through:
- Open Education & Skill Development - quality learning for every Indian
- Digital & Public Infrastructure - connectivity, identity, payments for all
- Entrepreneurial Ecosystem & Capacity Building - make it easy to build and create
India's story since independence is not one story. It is at least three.
The first story is the one told at Davos panels and in venture capital pitch decks: the world's most populous nation, a nuclear power, a space-faring civilization, the fifth-largest economy by nominal GDP, home to the world's largest biometric identity system and the fastest-growing major digital payments ecosystem. UPI processed over 100 billion transactions in the fiscal year ending March 2024. India Stack has become a reference architecture for dozens of countries looking to build digital public infrastructure. The Chandrayaan and Mangalyaan missions demonstrated cost-effective space engineering that NASA studies with genuine interest. The IT services industry alone generates revenues exceeding $250 billion. Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune are global R&D hubs. The startup ecosystem, despite cyclical funding contractions, has produced companies that compete globally.
The second story is the one told in NITI Aayog's own multidimensional poverty reports, in National Family Health Survey data, in the Annual Status of Education Reports published by Pratham, in the periodic labour force surveys conducted by the Ministry of Statistics. Roughly 230 million Indians still live below the national poverty line. Nearly 35% of children under five are stunted. Learning outcomes in government schools remain dire - ASER consistently finds that a significant share of Class V students cannot read a Class II text. Female labor force participation, after years of decline, has only recently begun to recover, and remains far below the levels seen in peer economies. The agrarian economy, which employs nearly 42% of the workforce, contributes less than 18% of GDP. India's per capita income, even at purchasing power parity, is a fraction of China's, let alone that of the advanced economies.
The third story is the one that connects the first two: the story of institutional capacity, governance quality, and state capability. India's democratic institutions are resilient but stressed. The judiciary operates with roughly 20 judges per million people, against a recommended 50. Tax-to-GDP ratios hover around 17-18%, well below what is needed to fund the public goods that a nation of 1.4 billion requires. The ease of doing business has improved in rankings but ground-level experience often tells a different story - land acquisition, environmental clearances, labor law compliance, and municipal permissions remain tangled. Police-to-population ratios are among the lowest in the world. Regulatory bodies are often understaffed and under-skilled.
These three stories are not contradictory. They are the same country, viewed at different resolutions. India is simultaneously a technological marvel and an institutional work-in-progress. The in/acc thesis is that the gap between the first story and the second can be closed, but only if the third story - the story of institutions and governance - is taken as seriously as the technology story.
To understand where India stands, it helps to understand what it is still recovering from. The economic regime that prevailed from roughly 1950 to 1991 - colloquially called the License Raj - was not simply a set of bad policies. It was a comprehensive institutional architecture built around the assumption that the state could and should direct the allocation of capital, determine what should be produced and in what quantities, decide who could enter which industry, and control the prices at which goods were sold.
The intellectual roots were a mix of Fabian socialism imported via the London School of Economics, Soviet-style planning admired by Nehru and his circle of advisers, and a genuine fear - not unreasonable in the 1950s - that a newly independent, capital-scarce, largely agrarian nation could not afford to leave industrialization to the market. P.C. Mahalanobis, the statistician who designed the Second Five Year Plan, explicitly modeled India's planning framework on the Feldman-Mahalanobis model, which prioritized heavy industry and capital goods over consumer goods and agriculture.
The results were predictable in hindsight. India's GDP growth rate averaged roughly 3.5% per year from 1950 to 1980 - the so-called "Hindu rate of growth," a term coined by Raj Krishna that has nothing to do with Hinduism and everything to do with the structural constraints of a command economy operating within a democratic framework. Industrial licensing created a system where incumbent firms had every incentive to lobby for restrictions on new entrants rather than invest in productivity. Import substitution, enforced through punitive tariffs and outright bans, meant that Indian consumers and businesses had access to outdated, overpriced goods. The Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act, intended to prevent concentration, in practice prevented scale. The Foreign Exchange Regulation Act made it nearly impossible to access foreign capital or technology on reasonable terms.
The human cost was enormous. Between 1950 and 1991, India's share of world trade fell from roughly 2% to 0.5%. Per capita income growth barely kept pace with population growth. China, which began its reforms in 1978, pulled dramatically ahead - the two countries had comparable per capita incomes in the early 1980s. By 1991, when India's balance-of-payments crisis forced liberalization, the gap was already visible and widening.
The liberalization of 1991 was not a revolution. It was a crisis response that became a paradigm shift. Finance Minister Manmohan Singh and his team - including Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Rakesh Mohan, and others - dismantled the most egregious elements of the License Raj: industrial licensing was abolished for most sectors, tariffs were reduced, the rupee was devalued and eventually made convertible on the current account, foreign direct investment was welcomed in many sectors, and the public sector's monopoly on banking, insurance, and telecommunications was broken.
The results were dramatic. GDP growth accelerated to an average of 6-7% through the 1990s and 2000s, peaking at over 9% in some years. The IT services boom - enabled by deregulation of telecommunications and the accident of the Y2K crisis - created a new middle class and demonstrated that Indian human capital could compete globally. Poverty rates fell significantly. Life expectancy rose. Infant mortality declined. A genuinely competitive private sector emerged in sectors from automobiles to pharmaceuticals to financial services.
But the reforms were incomplete. Agriculture was barely touched - the Essential Commodities Act, the Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) framework, restrictions on land leasing and contract farming, and the massive subsidy apparatus remained largely intact. Labor law reform was politically radioactive - the Industrial Disputes Act, with its requirement of government permission to lay off workers in firms with more than 100 employees, remained a powerful disincentive to formal manufacturing employment. Land acquisition remained a minefield of competing claims, inadequate records, and political risk. The judiciary was not reformed. The police were not reformed. Municipal governance - the tier of government closest to citizens' daily lives - received constitutional recognition through the 73rd and 74th Amendments but not the capacity or fiscal autonomy to function effectively.
The story of India since 1991 is therefore a story of selective liberalization: dramatic progress in sectors where reform was politically feasible (telecommunications, IT, financial services, aviation) and persistent stagnation in sectors where vested interests proved too powerful (agriculture, land, labor, judiciary). The in/acc project is, in large part, an attempt to complete the unfinished work of 1991 - not by repeating the same playbook, but by recognizing that the remaining reforms require technological infrastructure, institutional innovation, and new forms of political coalition-building that did not exist thirty years ago.
The most consequential Indian innovation of the 2010s was not a product or a company. It was a set of protocols.
The India Stack - comprising Aadhaar (biometric identity), UPI (payments), DigiLocker (document verification), eSign (digital signatures), and the Account Aggregator framework (consent-based financial data sharing) - represents something genuinely new in the history of development. It is not a government program in the traditional sense. It is not a market solution in the traditional sense. It is a set of open, interoperable, population-scale digital public goods that create a shared infrastructure layer on which both government programs and private innovation can build.
The numbers are staggering. Aadhaar covers over 1.3 billion residents. UPI processed over 13 billion transactions in a single month by late 2023, with a total value exceeding $200 billion monthly. The Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM) trinity enabled direct benefit transfers that have saved the government an estimated ₹2.7 lakh crore in leakage reduction since 2014, according to government estimates. The CoWIN platform, built on Aadhaar infrastructure, administered over 2 billion vaccine doses during the COVID-19 pandemic and was offered to other countries as an open-source solution.
India Stack matters for in/acc because it demonstrates a thesis that is central to our movement: that well-designed digital public infrastructure can simultaneously serve the goals of acceleration (by reducing transaction costs and enabling new business models), inclusion (by giving the poorest citizens access to formal financial services), and sustainability (by reducing waste and leakage in government spending). It is proof of concept that technology and institutional innovation can work together at population scale.
But India Stack also illustrates the limits of technology without institutional reform. Aadhaar-based authentication failures still exclude vulnerable populations from welfare entitlements. UPI's success has created market concentration concerns, with two apps controlling the vast majority of transactions. The data protection framework - the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, passed in 2023 - remains a work in progress. And the most important question about India Stack may be the one that is hardest to answer: whether the efficiency gains it enables in government service delivery will translate into improved state capacity more broadly, or whether they will remain islands of competence in an ocean of dysfunction.
India in the mid-2020s is a country of extraordinary capability and extraordinary constraint. We have the engineers, the entrepreneurs, the institutional memory, and - critically - a population young enough to build the future rather than simply manage the legacy of the past. The median age is still under 29. The demographic dividend is real, but it is not permanent. The window in which India can leverage its young population to build the physical, digital, and institutional infrastructure for sustained prosperity is perhaps two to three decades. After that, the dependency ratio begins to rise, and the opportunity cost of inaction becomes permanent.
The question is not whether India can grow. It is whether India can grow in a way that is inclusive enough to prevent social fracture, sustainable enough to avoid ecological catastrophe, and governed well enough to sustain public trust in democratic institutions. That is the question this manifesto attempts to answer.
India's development challenges can be organized around three fundamental deficits. These are not the fiscal deficit, the current account deficit, or the trade deficit - though those matter too. They are structural deficits that underlie and exacerbate every specific policy problem.
The governance deficit is the gap between what the Indian state promises and what it delivers. This gap is not primarily a function of bad intentions or even bad policy. It is a function of institutional capacity.
Consider the tax system. India's Goods and Services Tax, implemented in July 2017, was one of the most ambitious tax reforms attempted by any democracy. It replaced a patchwork of seventeen different central and state taxes with a single, multi-rate national consumption tax, administered through a shared digital infrastructure (GSTN). The economic logic was sound: a unified national market, reduced cascading of taxes, better compliance through digital trails, and eventual convergence toward a simpler rate structure.
The implementation reality was more complicated. The initial design had five rate slabs (0%, 5%, 12%, 18%, and 28%) plus a cess, making it one of the most complex GST systems in the world. Small businesses struggled with the technology requirements. The refund mechanism was slow, creating working capital crises. The anti-profiteering authority created uncertainty. Revenue collections took years to stabilize. The GST Council - a federal body with representation from both the Centre and the states - proved to be a genuinely innovative institutional mechanism for cooperative federalism, but also became a forum for political bargaining that sometimes subordinated economic logic to electoral calculus.
The GST story is emblematic. India often gets the broad direction right but struggles with the details of implementation, because the institutional machinery - the bureaucrats, the IT systems, the dispute resolution mechanisms, the feedback loops - is not fit for the complexity of what is being attempted. The same pattern repeats across domains: ambitious policy, followed by messy implementation, followed by incremental course correction that is often too slow.
The governance deficit shows up in measurable ways. India ranks poorly on indicators of government effectiveness, regulatory quality, and control of corruption in the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators. The time taken to enforce a contract through the courts averages over 1,400 days. Starting a business, despite improvements, still involves navigating multiple registrations across central, state, and municipal authorities. The quality of public services - schools, hospitals, water supply, sanitation, roads - varies enormously across states, districts, and even within cities.
What in/acc proposes: The governance deficit cannot be closed by better policy alone. It requires better institutional infrastructure. Digital systems that embed transparency, automate compliance, reduce discretion, and create accountability loops can substitute for the institutional capacity that India lacks and cannot build fast enough through traditional means. This is not a techno-utopian claim. It is an observation based on what India Stack has already demonstrated: that well-designed digital infrastructure can make government work better at scale.
The trust deficit is both a cause and a consequence of the governance deficit. When institutions do not deliver, people lose trust in them. When people lose trust, they exit from formal systems into informal ones - from the formal economy into the shadow economy, from the courts into private dispute resolution, from the banking system into cash and gold, from government schools into low-cost private alternatives of variable quality.
India's informal economy is estimated to account for roughly 50% of GDP and over 80% of employment, depending on definitions and measurement methodologies. This is not simply a matter of economic development level. It reflects a rational response to an institutional environment in which formality imposes costs - taxes, compliance, inspections, paperwork - without commensurate benefits in terms of contract enforcement, dispute resolution, infrastructure, or social protection.
The trust deficit extends to interpersonal and social trust. India ranks relatively low on generalized social trust in the World Values Survey. Caste, religion, language, and region continue to function as trust networks - people trust those within their community more than those outside it. This is not unique to India, but it has specific consequences in a country of India's diversity. It makes large-scale collective action harder. It makes impersonal market transactions riskier. It increases the importance of personal networks and relationships in economic life, which in turn creates barriers to entry for those without the right connections.
The erosion of trust in specific institutions is particularly concerning. Trust in the media has declined as the media landscape has fragmented and polarized. Trust in the political class is low, though democratic participation remains high - a paradox that suggests Indians believe in democracy as a system even when they are skeptical of its current practitioners. Trust in the judiciary is undermined by delays, not by doubts about judicial integrity at the higher levels. Trust in the police is perhaps the most damaged of all, shaped by decades of politicization, corruption at lower levels, and a colonial-era institutional design that prioritizes regime security over citizen service.
What in/acc proposes: Trust is rebuilt through consistent, verifiable performance. Technology can help by creating systems that are transparent by default - where the citizen can see what is happening with their application, their complaint, their money. But technology alone cannot rebuild trust. It requires a sustained commitment to institutional reform, to holding power accountable, and to building the social infrastructure - civil society organizations, independent media, academic institutions - that mediates between the state and the citizen.
The opportunity deficit is the gap between India's potential and its delivery of economic opportunity to its citizens. It is the deficit that most directly affects people's lives.
India needs to create roughly 8-10 million non-farm jobs every year to absorb the new entrants into the labor force and draw workers out of low-productivity agriculture. In practice, formal job creation has fallen well short of this target. The share of regular, salaried employment in total employment has grown, but slowly. A significant portion of new employment has been in the gig economy and informal services - categories that offer flexibility but not security, income but not benefits, work but not careers.
The reasons are structural. India's manufacturing sector has never achieved the labor-absorbing, export-oriented industrialization that characterized the East Asian growth stories. Manufacturing's share of GDP has been roughly flat at 15-17% for decades - well below the 25-30% that characterized the peak industrialization phase in China, South Korea, and Taiwan. The reasons are debated: rigid labor laws, inadequate infrastructure, high logistics costs, unreliable power supply, small firm size, and the burden of regulatory compliance are all cited. Whatever the relative weights, the consequence is clear: India has not found a path to mass formal employment that works for its demographic scale.
Education, the traditional engine of upward mobility, is not delivering. India produces a large number of graduates, but employers consistently report that the majority are not employable without significant additional training. The National Education Policy 2020 represents a serious attempt to reimagine the system - with its emphasis on multidisciplinary learning, flexibility, integration of vocational education, and mother-tongue instruction in early years - but implementation will be slow and uneven. The gap between elite institutions (IITs, IIMs, AIIMS, top law schools) and the mass higher education system is vast.
The spatial dimension of the opportunity deficit is important. India's economic geography is characterized by enormous variation. Per capita income in Goa or Delhi is several times that of Bihar or Jharkhand. The southern and western states have broadly achieved middle-income levels of development; parts of the northern and eastern heartland remain at low-income levels. Internal migration - from Bihar to Maharashtra, from Uttar Pradesh to Gujarat, from Odisha to Kerala - is a massive, under-governed phenomenon that provides livelihoods but also creates social and political tensions.
What in/acc proposes: Closing the opportunity deficit requires action on multiple fronts simultaneously. There is no single intervention that will create 10 million jobs a year. What is needed is a portfolio approach: investments in infrastructure that reduce logistics costs and enable manufacturing; reforms in labor law that encourage formalization without removing worker protections; a skills ecosystem that is responsive to employer needs; financial inclusion that gives small entrepreneurs access to credit; and digital infrastructure that enables new forms of economic activity - from e-commerce to remote work to creator economies - that were not possible a decade ago.
India's demographics are both its greatest asset and its most urgent challenge. The numbers are well known: a median age of 28, a working-age population that will continue to grow until the late 2040s or early 2050s, a dependency ratio that is currently favorable and will remain so for roughly two more decades. Economists call this the "demographic dividend" - the period in which a country's working-age population is unusually large relative to dependents, creating the potential for higher savings, investment, and growth.
But the demographic dividend is not automatic. It is a window of opportunity that opens and, eventually, closes. East Asian economies - Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore - captured their demographic dividends through massive investments in education, health, infrastructure, and export-oriented manufacturing during the relevant window. China did the same, albeit under very different political conditions. The key insight is that the demographic dividend is less about the number of young people and more about the quality of the opportunities available to them. A large young population that is educated, healthy, and employed in productive work is an engine of growth. A large young population that is poorly educated, unhealthy, and unable to find decent work is a source of frustration, instability, and wasted potential.
India's education system is, in many ways, the bottleneck of the entire development story. The numbers are sobering.
On access, India has made genuine progress. The Right to Education Act of 2009, combined with the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and its successor programs, has brought near-universal enrollment at the primary level. Gross enrollment ratios in secondary and higher education have risen steadily. The number of universities and colleges has expanded enormously.
On quality, the picture is grim. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), published by the NGO Pratham, has for over two decades documented a persistent learning crisis. A significant share of students enrolled in Class V - that is, students who have been in school for five years - cannot read a simple paragraph or do basic arithmetic at the Class II level. The COVID-19 pandemic, which shut schools for extended periods, made things worse. The ASER 2022 report found significant learning losses, particularly among younger children.
The causes are multiple and reinforcing. Teacher absenteeism in government schools is well-documented. The curriculum has historically been rigid, exam-oriented, and disconnected from practical skills. Teacher training institutions are often of poor quality. The pay and social status of government school teachers vary enormously across states. School infrastructure - buildings, toilets, libraries, laboratories, internet connectivity - is inadequate in many areas.
The higher education system faces different but related problems. There are islands of genuine excellence - the IITs, IIMs, Indian Statistical Institute, TIFR, the better NITs and IIITs, and a handful of private universities like Ashoka, Azim Premji, BITS Pilani, and ISB. But the vast bulk of the system - the thousands of affiliated colleges, the state universities, the mushrooming private colleges of variable quality - produces graduates who lack critical thinking skills, practical knowledge, and employability. Engineering colleges, which expanded rapidly in the 2000s and 2010s, now face declining enrollment as the market recognizes that a degree from a third-tier institution is not a ticket to employment.
The National Education Policy 2020 represents the most ambitious attempt to reimagine Indian education since independence. Its core ideas - multidisciplinary undergraduate degrees, flexibility to combine subjects, integration of vocational and academic tracks, emphasis on foundational literacy and numeracy, use of mother tongue as medium of instruction in early years, autonomous governance for institutions, and a regulatory architecture that separates standard-setting from funding from accreditation - are genuinely sound. But policy and implementation are separated by a vast distance in Indian education, because education is a concurrent subject in the Constitution, meaning both Centre and states have jurisdiction, and because the system is so large that even well-designed reforms take years to percolate.
If education is the bottleneck, health is the missing foundation. India spends roughly 2.1% of GDP on health - one of the lowest ratios for any major economy. The consequences are visible in every health indicator.
India has 0.7 physicians per 1,000 people, compared to the WHO-recommended minimum of 1 per 1,000. The distribution is severely skewed: urban areas have far more doctors than rural areas, and the southern states have far more than the northern ones. Nursing staff ratios are similarly inadequate. Hospital bed density - roughly 0.5 per 1,000 - is well below that of China (4.3), Brazil (2.1), or even Bangladesh (0.8 in some estimates).
Malnutrition remains a silent emergency. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019-21) found that 35.5% of children under five are stunted, 19.3% are wasted, and 32.1% are underweight. Anemia affects over 57% of women of reproductive age and 67% of children aged 6-59 months. These are not just health statistics - they are constraints on cognitive development, educational attainment, and lifetime productivity. A stunted child is likely to earn significantly less as an adult than a well-nourished one.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of India's health infrastructure with brutal clarity. The second wave in April-May 2021 - with oxygen shortages, overwhelmed hospitals, and cremation grounds operating around the clock - demonstrated what happens when a health system designed for normal loads faces a surge. But it also demonstrated capacity for rapid response: the vaccine production and distribution effort, leveraging the Serum Institute's manufacturing capacity, the CoWIN platform, and the last-mile delivery network, was a genuine achievement.
Ayushman Bharat - the national health protection scheme launched in 2018 - is an important step. It provides health insurance coverage of up to ₹5 lakh per family per year for secondary and tertiary hospitalization for the bottom 40% of the population. Over 30 crore Ayushman cards have been created. But insurance without adequate supply-side capacity is of limited value. If there are not enough hospitals, doctors, and nurses to treat patients, insurance coverage alone cannot close the gap.
The demographic window has a finite duration. Japan's working-age population peaked in the 1990s. China's peaked around 2015. South Korea and Thailand are already aging. India's window is still open, but the clock is ticking. By the late 2040s, India too will begin to age. The investments in human capital that are made in the next two decades will determine whether India arrives at that demographic transition as a prosperous, middle-income nation or as a prematurely aging one that failed to capture its dividend.
This is not abstract. A child born in India today will enter the workforce around 2044-2048. The quality of the education, nutrition, and healthcare that child receives in the next eighteen years will determine their productivity and earning potential for the following forty years. The stakes of getting human capital investment right are measured not in electoral cycles but in generational outcomes.
The in/acc framework rests on a simple but consequential claim: that GDP growth, while necessary, is not sufficient, and that a civilization serious about its future must track at least three dimensions of progress simultaneously.
This is not an anti-growth position. India needs growth - sustained, rapid, broad-based growth - to fund the public goods, infrastructure, and human capital investments that its population requires. A country with India's per capita income cannot afford to be cavalier about economic growth. The degrowth movement, as articulated by thinkers like Jason Hickel, contains valid critiques of the ecological unsustainability of high-income consumption patterns, but its prescriptions are designed for societies that have already achieved high living standards. Applying degrowth logic to a country where hundreds of millions still lack adequate nutrition, housing, healthcare, and education is not progressive - it is a prescription for continued deprivation dressed up in ecological virtue.
But growth alone is not enough, and India has sufficient evidence of this from its own experience. The period from 2004 to 2014 saw India achieve some of its highest GDP growth rates ever - yet the benefits were unevenly distributed, jobless growth became a political talking point, and environmental degradation accelerated. High growth with persistent inequality, ecological destruction, and institutional decay is not progress in any meaningful sense. It is wealth accumulation that is brittle, contested, and ultimately unsustainable.
GDP Growth measures the economy's aggregate productive capacity. It matters because it determines the total resources available for investment, consumption, and public goods. India's GDP growth target should be 7-8% sustained over the next two decades - which requires continued structural reform, investment in infrastructure and human capital, and a policy environment conducive to enterprise and innovation.
The Gini Coefficient measures income and wealth inequality. India's consumption Gini is estimated at around 0.35-0.36 - moderate by international standards, but likely understated because the consumption expenditure surveys miss the top of the distribution. Wealth inequality is significantly higher. The top 10% of Indians hold over 65% of total wealth, and the top 1% hold over 40%. These levels of concentration are problematic for several reasons: they undermine equality of opportunity, they concentrate political power, they reduce the marginal utility of economic growth (a dollar of growth that accrues to someone already wealthy produces less welfare than one that accrues to someone poor), and they erode social cohesion.
Doughnut Metrics - inspired by Kate Raworth's doughnut economics framework - track whether a society is operating within ecological ceilings (climate change, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, biodiversity loss, land use change, freshwater use, nitrogen and phosphorus loading, air pollution, ozone layer depletion) while meeting social foundations (food, health, education, income, political voice, social equity, gender equality, housing, networks, energy, water, jobs). The doughnut framework is useful because it makes explicit the dual constraint that India faces: a social floor that has not yet been universally achieved, and an ecological ceiling that is already being breached in several dimensions.
India's ecological situation is serious. Air pollution in the Indo-Gangetic plain is among the worst in the world. Groundwater is being depleted at unsustainable rates in Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, and parts of Tamil Nadu. River pollution remains severe despite decades of clean-up programs. Biodiversity is under pressure from habitat loss, urbanization, and agricultural intensification. India is the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in absolute terms, though its per capita emissions remain well below the global average.
The in/acc position is that India cannot afford to choose between growth and sustainability. It must find growth pathways that are ecologically viable - which means investing heavily in renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, circular economy practices, and ecological restoration, even as it accelerates economic growth. The good news is that many of these investments are now economically rational: solar power is cheaper than coal in most of India, electric vehicles are approaching cost parity with internal combustion engines, and regenerative agriculture practices can improve yields while reducing input costs.
The reason for tracking three metrics rather than one is that they create a system of checks and balances. Optimizing for GDP alone leads to growth that is extractive, unequal, and ecologically destructive. Optimizing for equality alone can lead to redistribution without wealth creation - the trap that many post-colonial economies fell into. Optimizing for sustainability alone - without growth and inclusion - is a luxury that only wealthy societies can afford.
The three metrics function as a trilemma navigator. Any policy proposal can be evaluated against all three dimensions. A highway project increases GDP (good for acceleration) but may displace communities (bad for inclusion) and destroy ecosystems (bad for sustainability). The triadic framework forces the question: can the highway be built in a way that compensates displaced communities fairly, provides them with better opportunities, and minimizes ecological damage through better routing and design? Often the answer is yes, but only if the question is asked at the design stage rather than as an afterthought.
This is not about perfection. There will be trade-offs. There will be cases where acceleration and sustainability are in genuine tension, where inclusion and efficiency pull in different directions. The point of the triadic framework is not to eliminate trade-offs but to make them visible and explicit, so that they can be debated, negotiated, and decided through democratic processes rather than resolved by default in favor of whichever interest has the most power.
Friedrich Hayek's insight about the "fatal conceit" of central planning - the idea that no planner can possess the distributed knowledge that the price system aggregates - is powerful and largely correct. The failure of the License Raj was, at its core, a failure of the planning assumption: the belief that a small group of technocrats in Yojana Bhavan could make better allocation decisions than millions of producers and consumers operating through markets.
But the lesson of the License Raj is not that the state should do nothing. It is that the state should do different things than it was doing. The distinction between a state that tries to pick winners and allocate resources (which fails) and a state that builds infrastructure, enforces rules, provides public goods, and corrects market failures (which is necessary) is fundamental to the in/acc worldview.
The intellectual framework that best captures this distinction is complexity economics, as articulated by thinkers like W. Brian Arthur, Eric Beinhocker, and the researchers at the Santa Fe Institute.
Classical economics treats the economy as a system that tends toward equilibrium - supply meets demand, prices adjust, markets clear. This is a useful approximation for some purposes, but it misses the most important features of real economies: that they are dynamic, adaptive, and prone to emergent phenomena that cannot be predicted from the behavior of individual agents. Economic growth is not a smooth process but a punctuated one, driven by the co-evolution of technologies, institutions, and social norms. Innovation clusters in unpredictable ways. Small advantages compound into large ones through positive feedback loops. Path dependence means that the order in which things happen matters, not just the set of conditions.
For India, the complexity lens offers several important insights.
First, humility about prediction. The Indian economy is a complex adaptive system of 1.4 billion agents interacting across multiple levels of governance, in dozens of languages, across vastly different ecological and cultural contexts. No model, no matter how sophisticated, can predict its trajectory with precision. This argues for policy approaches that are adaptive, experimental, and tolerant of failure - that try many things, measure what works, scale what succeeds, and abandon what doesn't.
Second, the importance of institutions as rules of the game. In complexity economics, institutions are not just constraints on behavior - they are the scaffolding that enables coordination at scale. Good institutions reduce uncertainty, align incentives, and lower transaction costs. Bad institutions do the opposite. India's development challenge is fundamentally an institutional one: not building more institutions, but building better ones.
Third, the power of platforms and protocols. In complex systems, the most leveraged interventions are often not direct allocations of resources but changes to the rules and infrastructure on which many actors operate. UPI is a protocol, not a program. Aadhaar is a platform, not a service. These interventions are powerful precisely because they don't try to direct behavior - they enable it. They create the conditions for a million experiments to run simultaneously, and let the ones that work scale while the ones that don't quietly fade.
Fourth, the danger of monoculture. Complex systems are resilient when they are diverse and fragile when they are uniform. An economy dominated by a few large firms is less resilient than one with a rich ecosystem of firms of different sizes and types. A polity dominated by a single ideology is less resilient than one with genuine pluralism. An agricultural system planted with a single crop variety is less resilient than one with genetic diversity. India's diversity - linguistic, cultural, ecological, economic - is not a bug to be engineered away. It is a feature that confers resilience, provided it is organized through institutions that enable coordination without requiring uniformity.
The complexity perspective argues against grand, top-down redesigns and in favor of what Charles Lindblom called "the science of muddling through" - though with a modern twist. The twist is that digital infrastructure now enables a kind of intelligent muddling that was not previously possible. When you have real-time data on how a policy is performing - how many people are using it, where the bottlenecks are, what the unintended consequences look like - you can iterate much faster than when policy evaluation depends on periodic surveys conducted months or years after implementation.
The in/acc approach to policy is therefore:
- Set clear directional goals (the three north stars) without prescribing the specific path
- Build infrastructure (digital and physical) that enables many different actors to pursue those goals
- Measure relentlessly - with real-time data where possible, with periodic evaluation where not
- Iterate quickly - change what isn't working, scale what is, and accept that the optimal solution will emerge from experimentation rather than design
- Maintain diversity - resist the temptation to standardize prematurely, and allow different states and regions to try different approaches
This is not laissez-faire. It is an active, engaged, infrastructure-building state that shapes the rules of the game without trying to play every position on the field.
Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is a term that has gained currency in global development circles, largely because of India's example. But it is often misunderstood. DPI is not government IT. It is not digitization of existing processes. It is not e-governance in the 1990s sense of putting forms online.
DPI, in the India Stack sense, refers to open, interoperable, population-scale digital systems that function as shared infrastructure - like roads or railways - on which both public and private actors can build. The key properties are:
- Open standards and protocols - not proprietary systems controlled by a single vendor
- Interoperability - different systems can talk to each other without bilateral agreements
- Population scale - designed from the start to work for 1.4 billion people, not as a pilot for 10,000
- Unbundled design - identity is separated from payments, which is separated from data, which is separated from consent management
- Public-private collaboration - government builds the rails, private sector builds the trains
The India Stack has evolved in layers over the past fifteen years:
Identity Layer (Aadhaar, 2009-present): A 12-digit unique identity number linked to biometric data (fingerprints and iris scans) for every resident of India. Not a citizenship document - a proof of identity that enables KYC (Know Your Customer) processes to be completed digitally in seconds rather than days. Aadhaar has been controversial - privacy concerns are real, and the Supreme Court's landmark Puttaswamy judgment in 2017 established the right to privacy as a fundamental right, leading to constraints on mandatory Aadhaar linkage. But the core utility of having a universal, verifiable identity is immense in a country where a large portion of the population previously had no formal identity document.
Payments Layer (UPI, 2016-present): The Unified Payments Interface, built by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), enables instant, 24/7, interoperable money transfers between any two bank accounts using a mobile phone. UPI's design is elegant: it is a protocol, not an app. Any bank or fintech company can build an app that connects to UPI. This has created a competitive ecosystem of payment apps while maintaining interoperability - you can pay a Google Pay merchant with a PhonePe app, or vice versa, because they all speak the same protocol.
Data Layer (Account Aggregator, 2021-present): The Account Aggregator framework enables consent-based sharing of financial data between institutions. A borrower can share their bank statements, tax returns, and other financial data with a lender digitally, with granular consent controls - what data, for how long, for what purpose. This is designed to solve the credit information asymmetry that makes it difficult for small businesses and individuals without formal credit histories to access loans.
Document Layer (DigiLocker, eSign): Digital storage and verification of documents - educational certificates, driving licenses, insurance policies - eliminating the need for physical copies and enabling instant verification.
Commerce Layer (ONDC, 2022-present): The Open Network for Digital Commerce is the most ambitious extension of the India Stack philosophy. It applies the UPI model to e-commerce: an open, interoperable protocol that allows any buyer app to connect with any seller app, breaking the platform monopoly model. A buyer searching on one app can find and purchase from a seller listed on a different app, because both speak the ONDC protocol. If it works at scale, it could fundamentally change the economics of digital commerce in India.
The in/acc claim is that DPI is not just a technology layer - it is civilizational infrastructure in the same sense that the Roman road network, the British railway system in India, or the American interstate highway system were civilizational infrastructure. These systems did not just move goods and people. They restructured economic geography, enabled new forms of organization, and created the conditions for subsequent waves of innovation that their builders could not have anticipated.
India Stack is doing the same thing. UPI did not just digitize payments - it created the conditions for an explosion of fintech innovation, from buy-now-pay-later products to micro-insurance to AI-driven credit scoring for previously unbanked populations. Aadhaar did not just provide identity - it created the conditions for direct benefit transfers that bypass the leakage-prone intermediary chain. ONDC, if successful, will not just create an alternative to Amazon and Flipkart - it will create the conditions for a new model of digital commerce in which the network effects accrue to the protocol rather than to a single platform.
The design philosophy matters as much as the technology. India Stack's unbundled, protocol-based approach means that the infrastructure is genuinely neutral - it does not favor any particular business model or company. This is in sharp contrast to the platform model that dominates digital commerce globally, where the infrastructure and the marketplace are owned by the same entity, creating inherent conflicts of interest.
India's DPI story has global implications. At the G20 summit in 2023, under India's presidency, DPI was elevated to a central theme of the development agenda. The Global DPI Repository, launched at the G20, offers India's experience as a reference for other countries. Several nations - including Singapore, the Philippines, Brazil, and countries in Africa and the Middle East - are studying or adopting elements of the India Stack model.
This is significant for in/acc because it demonstrates that Indian innovation in institutional design can be globally relevant. India is not just a consumer of development models designed elsewhere - it is a producer of models that other countries find worth emulating. This is a shift in the direction of knowledge flows that has profound implications for India's soft power and for the broader project of what we might call "development innovation."
The in/acc movement draws heavily from the Cosmos/Interchain philosophy in blockchain: the idea that the right architecture for a complex, diverse system is not a single monolithic chain (as in the Ethereum vision) but a network of sovereign, interoperable chains that can communicate through shared protocols while maintaining their own governance.
This is not just a blockchain metaphor. It is a design philosophy for governance itself, and it maps remarkably well onto India's constitutional architecture.
India's federal structure is often discussed as a problem - a source of coordination failure, policy fragmentation, and political bargaining. And it is all of those things. But it is also India's greatest institutional asset, and in/acc takes the strong position that Indian federalism should be deepened, not diluted.
The case for federalism rests on several pillars.
Diversity requires devolution. India's states are not administrative conveniences. They are, in many cases, distinct civilizational units with their own languages, cultural traditions, historical trajectories, and development challenges. Kerala's health outcomes are vastly different from Uttar Pradesh's, not because of a different climate or geography, but because of different institutional histories, political movements, and policy choices made over decades. A policy that works in Tamil Nadu may fail in Jharkhand, and vice versa. Centralized, one-size-fits-all approaches are particularly ill-suited to India's diversity.
Federalism enables experimentation. The United States Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously described states as "laboratories of democracy." Indian states have played exactly this role. Gujarat's Jyotigram Yojana - which separated agricultural and domestic power supply to enable 24/7 power for homes while rationing agricultural power - was a policy innovation that emerged from state-level experimentation. Kerala's decentralized planning and local governance model, implemented through the People's Plan Campaign in the 1990s, has influenced thinking about panchayati raj nationally. Tamil Nadu's midday meal scheme, one of the most successful nutrition interventions in the developing world, began as a state program decades before it was adopted nationally. Rajasthan's right to information movement gave birth to the national RTI Act.
Competition among states drives improvement. When states compete for investment, talent, and recognition, the result can be a race to the top in governance quality. The ease of doing business rankings, despite their limitations, created competitive dynamics that motivated states to simplify procedures and improve services. The GST Council, for all its flaws, is a genuinely innovative model of cooperative federalism that forces the Centre and states to negotiate tax policy collectively.
Federalism is a check on authoritarian consolidation. In a country of India's diversity, excessive centralization is not just inefficient - it is dangerous. Federal structures distribute power and create multiple centers of authority that can check each other. The constitutional division of subjects into Union, State, and Concurrent lists, the role of the Finance Commission in revenue sharing, and the existence of state-level elections that often produce different results from national elections - all of these are features, not bugs.
But federalism without interoperability creates fragmentation. If every state builds its own systems with its own standards, the result is a patchwork that imposes costs on citizens and businesses that operate across state lines. India has experienced this: different states had different tax regimes before GST, different labor laws, different land record systems, different approaches to business registration.
The India Stack model offers a resolution: shared protocols that enable interoperability while preserving state-level sovereignty over implementation. GST's design - a single tax framework with shared technology (GSTN) but state-level administration - is an imperfect but instructive example. The PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan, which creates a shared digital platform for infrastructure planning across ministries and states, is another.
The in/acc position is that India needs more of this: shared, open, interoperable protocols that function as the connective tissue between sovereign state-level systems. This is the Cosmos model applied to governance: every state is a sovereign chain, but they communicate through shared protocols that enable seamless interaction for citizens and businesses.
Specific areas where interoperability is urgently needed:
- Land records: Every state has its own system, often partially digitized, with different data standards. A national land record interoperability layer - not a centralized database, but a protocol for sharing and verifying records across states - would transform property markets and credit access.
- Business registration and compliance: Despite the centralized GST and company registration systems, doing business across states still requires navigating different state-level rules on labor, environment, and municipal governance.
- Education credentials: Different state boards, different universities, different grading systems. A verifiable credential protocol - built on the DigiLocker model - could make educational qualifications portable and trustworthy.
- Healthcare records: The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission is building toward a national health ID and interoperable health records, but the ecosystem is still nascent.
- Justice system data: Different state courts use different case management systems, making it difficult to track cases, analyze patterns, or ensure consistency in jurisprudence.
Corruption in India is not a marginal phenomenon. It is a structural feature of the institutional landscape that imposes enormous costs on economic growth, public service delivery, and social trust.
Estimating the total cost of corruption is inherently difficult, but the available evidence is suggestive. The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) regularly identifies irregularities in government spending that run into tens of thousands of crores. The 2G spectrum allocation case, the coal block allocation ("Coalgate") controversy, and the Commonwealth Games scam were just the most visible examples of a phenomenon that pervades every level of government, from the highest policy decisions to the smallest municipal permit.
Corruption in India takes multiple forms:
Grand corruption: Large-scale misallocation of public resources - mining licenses, spectrum allocations, defense contracts, infrastructure tenders - where the sums involved are enormous and the beneficiaries are politically connected firms and individuals.
Petty corruption: The daily experience of ordinary citizens - paying bribes for services that should be free, for permits that should be routine, for police to file an FIR, for a government hospital to provide treatment. The India Corruption Study by Transparency International India has documented the pervasiveness of petty corruption across government services.
Regulatory corruption: The use of regulatory complexity as a tool for rent extraction. When rules are opaque, compliance is burdensome, and enforcement is discretionary, the regulator has enormous power to harass those who do not pay and protect those who do. This is perhaps the most economically damaging form of corruption, because it creates a tax on formality that drives economic activity into the informal sector.
Electoral corruption: The role of unaccounted money in politics. Despite reforms - electoral bonds (now struck down by the Supreme Court), disclosure requirements, spending limits - the nexus between money and political power remains strong. The cost of fighting elections has escalated to levels that make candidates dependent on donors, which in turn creates obligations that distort policy.
There is a temptation to believe that technology can simply "solve" corruption - that if we put everything on blockchain, make everything transparent, and automate everything, corruption will disappear. This is naive. Corruption is fundamentally a problem of incentives, power, and institutional design. Technology can change the cost-benefit calculation for corrupt actors, but it cannot eliminate the underlying incentives.
That said, technology can do things that traditional anti-corruption measures cannot:
Reduce discretion. When a process is automated and rule-based, there is less scope for an official to demand a bribe in exchange for exercising discretion. The shift from discretionary allocation (of spectrum, mining rights, land) to auction-based allocation is an example of this principle. Digital processes that are transparent and rule-based reduce the surface area for corruption.
Increase transparency. When government spending, procurement, and decision-making are documented in digital systems that are accessible to citizens and oversight bodies, it becomes harder to hide misallocation. The Government e-Marketplace (GeM), launched in 2016 for government procurement, is an example - by creating a transparent digital marketplace for government purchases, it reduces the scope for favoritism in procurement.
Create audit trails. Digital transactions create records that can be analyzed, audited, and investigated. The shift from cash-based benefit distribution to direct benefit transfers via Aadhaar-linked bank accounts has reduced leakage significantly - former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley cited savings of over ₹1 lakh crore. While the exact number is debated, the directional impact is not.
Enable pattern detection. AI and data analytics can identify patterns in government spending, procurement, and decision-making that suggest corruption - unusual concentrations of contracts with particular vendors, suspicious timing of approvals, statistical anomalies in program outcomes. This does not replace investigation, but it can direct investigative resources more effectively.
in/acc proposes a layered anti-corruption infrastructure that mirrors the India Stack architecture:
Layer 1: Digital Identity and Authentication. Every government transaction should be linked to verified identities - of the official who approved it, the vendor who received the contract, the beneficiary who received the payment. This already exists in part through Aadhaar and government employee IDs, but it needs to be extended and made consistent across all government interactions.
Layer 2: Transparent Procurement. All government procurement above a threshold should be conducted through digital platforms with public visibility into the tender process, bid submissions, evaluation criteria, and award decisions. GeM is a start, but it needs to be extended to state governments and to categories of procurement - particularly construction and infrastructure - that remain largely offline.
Layer 3: Fund Flow Tracking. Every rupee of government spending should be traceable from allocation (in the budget) to deployment (in the field). This requires end-to-end digitization of fund flow across central ministries, state treasuries, district administrations, and implementing agencies. The Public Financial Management System (PFMS) provides a foundation, but coverage is incomplete and real-time visibility is limited.
Layer 4: Outcome Measurement. Spending transparency is necessary but not sufficient. What matters is whether the money produced the intended outcome. Did the road get built? Is the school functional? Is the hospital staffed? Outcome measurement requires a combination of administrative data, satellite imagery, citizen feedback, and field surveys - increasingly enabled by AI and remote sensing.
Layer 5: Whistleblower Infrastructure. People who know about corruption need safe channels to report it. Cryptographic anonymity, secure communication channels, and legal protections for whistleblowers are essential complements to digital transparency. The Whistleblowers Protection Act of 2014 exists on paper but has been weak in practice.
Layer 6: Accountability Mechanisms. Transparency without accountability is just information. The data generated by layers 1-5 must feed into functioning accountability institutions - the CBI, the CVC, the Lokpal (which has been largely dormant since its creation), state anti-corruption bureaus, the CAG, and the judiciary. Strengthening these institutions - their independence, capacity, and speed - is as important as building the digital infrastructure.
The Indian judiciary is drowning. As of early 2024, over 5 crore cases are pending across all levels of the judiciary - roughly 4.4 crore in the subordinate courts, 60 lakh in the High Courts, and 80,000 in the Supreme Court. The average time to resolve a civil case in district courts exceeds three years. Many cases drag on for a decade or more. The phrase "justice delayed is justice denied" is so frequently invoked in Indian legal discourse that it has become a cliche, but the reality it describes is devastating.
The human cost of judicial delay is enormous and unevenly distributed. For a wealthy litigant, delay is an inconvenience. For a poor one, it can be ruinous. An undertrial prisoner - someone who has been charged but not convicted - may spend years in jail waiting for trial. The National Crime Records Bureau data consistently shows that undertrials constitute over 75% of India's prison population. A small business owner entangled in a contractual dispute may go bankrupt waiting for resolution. A woman seeking maintenance after desertion may wait years for an order that, when it comes, is inadequate.
The causes of the backlog are structural:
Insufficient judges. India has roughly 20-21 judges per million people, against a Law Commission recommendation of 50. The sanctioned strength itself is inadequate, and actual strength is even lower - judicial vacancies in the High Courts have persistently hovered around 30-40% of sanctioned positions. The appointment process, governed by the collegium system since the Supreme Court's judgments in the 1990s, is slow, opaque, and often caught up in Centre-judiciary tensions.
Excessive litigation by the government. The government - Centre and states combined - is the single largest litigant in Indian courts. A significant share of the pending cases involves government entities, often fighting cases that could be settled or withdrawn. The National Litigation Policy, first announced in 2010 and periodically revived, has never been effectively implemented.
Procedural complexity. The Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, and the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (now partly replaced by the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023), provide for multiple stages of litigation, extensive documentation, frequent adjournments, and a culture of delay that benefits certain classes of litigants (typically those with more resources).
Infrastructure deficits. Many subordinate courts operate in inadequate physical spaces, with insufficient support staff, outdated technology, and poor connectivity. The National Judicial Data Grid and e-filing systems have improved data availability but have not fundamentally transformed how courts operate.
in/acc does not propose replacing judges with algorithms. Adjudication requires human judgment, contextual understanding, and the ability to weigh competing values in ways that no current AI system can replicate. But technology can dramatically improve the efficiency of the judicial process in several ways:
Case management and scheduling. AI-driven case management systems can optimize court schedules, identify cases that are ready for hearing, flag cases that have been pending beyond threshold periods, and reduce the time wasted on adjournments. The eCourts project has made progress here, but the systems are often basic and not widely adopted.
Legal research and jurisprudence analysis. Judges and lawyers spend enormous amounts of time on legal research - finding relevant precedents, analyzing how different courts have interpreted similar provisions, understanding the evolution of legal doctrine. AI systems trained on Indian case law can dramatically accelerate this process. More importantly, they can identify inconsistencies in how different courts interpret the same law, which is a significant problem in a system with 25 High Courts and thousands of subordinate courts.
Document analysis and summarization. A significant portion of judicial time is spent reading lengthy submissions, affidavits, and evidence. AI summarization tools can help judges quickly identify the key facts, legal issues, and arguments in a case, freeing time for the analysis and reasoning that only humans can do.
Alternative dispute resolution. Online dispute resolution (ODR) platforms can handle high volumes of straightforward disputes - consumer complaints, minor contractual disagreements, traffic challans - without burdening the regular court system. Several Indian startups and government initiatives are experimenting with ODR, and the results are promising.
Evidence management. Digital evidence management systems - using cryptographic hashing to ensure integrity, blockchain for chain of custody, and secure storage for sensitive materials - can address the persistent problem of evidence tampering and loss.
Predictive analytics for case prioritization. Not all cases are equal in urgency. Cases involving undertrials in custody, cases with elderly or seriously ill parties, cases affecting large numbers of people (public interest litigation), and cases with significant economic stakes should be prioritized. AI systems can help identify and prioritize these cases based on objective criteria.
Technology without institutional reform will be limited in its impact. The in/acc agenda for judicial reform includes:
Increase judicial strength. India should aim to double the number of judges within a decade - from roughly 20 per million to 40 per million. This requires expanding the pool of qualified candidates (which in turn requires improving legal education), streamlining the appointment process, and funding the infrastructure to support more judges.
Reduce government litigation. A serious implementation of the National Litigation Policy, with binding targets for reduction in government cases, review committees to identify cases that should be settled or withdrawn, and accountability for government lawyers who file frivolous appeals, could reduce the caseload by millions.
Simplify procedure. The procedural codes need to be radically simplified, with a focus on reducing the number of hearings required to resolve a case, limiting adjournments, encouraging written submissions over oral arguments (except in the most complex cases), and setting firm timelines for each stage of the process.
Invest in infrastructure. Court buildings, technology systems, support staff, and training for judges and court staff all require sustained investment. The budget allocation for the judiciary is a tiny fraction of government spending and needs to increase significantly.
Strengthen alternative dispute resolution. Mediation, arbitration, and online dispute resolution should be the first resort for most civil disputes, with regular courts reserved for cases that genuinely require judicial intervention. India's Mediation Act, 2023 is a step in the right direction but needs to be complemented by investment in mediator training and infrastructure.
India's regulatory landscape is one of the most complex in the world. A typical business operating across states must comply with regulations from multiple central ministries, state departments, municipal bodies, and specialized regulators. The compliance burden falls disproportionately on small businesses, which lack the resources to navigate the regulatory maze - driving them into informality.
The problem is not that India has too many regulations. It is that the regulatory system suffers from several design flaws:
Fragmentation. Different aspects of the same activity are regulated by different bodies that do not coordinate with each other. Starting a restaurant, for example, requires licenses from the municipal corporation (building permit, trade license), the food safety authority (FSSAI), the fire department, the health department, the police (for serving alcohol, if applicable), and potentially others. Each has its own process, timeline, and inspection regime.
Discretion. Many regulations are drafted in broad, ambiguous language that gives the implementing officer wide discretion. This discretion is the breeding ground for corruption. When the rules are unclear, the official's interpretation becomes the de facto rule, and that interpretation can be influenced by payments.
Compliance burden. The total compliance burden - the time, money, and effort required to comply with all applicable regulations - is enormous. The World Bank's Doing Business report (before it was discontinued) consistently showed that Indian businesses spent more time on regulatory compliance than businesses in most peer countries. The burden falls hardest on small firms, creating a perverse incentive to stay small and informal.
Outdated laws. Many regulations are relics of a different era. The Indian Penal Code (1860), the Indian Evidence Act (1872), the Factories Act (1948), and many other laws were drafted for a world that no longer exists. While the criminal law reforms of 2023 (Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam) represent an attempt to modernize the criminal justice framework, vast swaths of commercial, labor, and administrative law remain outdated.
in/acc advocates for regulatory reform based on the following principles:
Simplicity. Regulations should be as simple as possible - clear, specific, and easy to understand. Complex regulations are more likely to be misunderstood, selectively enforced, and used as tools for rent extraction. Where complexity is necessary (financial regulation, environmental standards), it should be accompanied by clear guidance, compliance assistance, and dispute resolution mechanisms.
Composability. Regulations should be modular and interoperable - designed to work together without creating contradictions or gaps. This requires coordination across regulatory bodies and a shared understanding of the regulatory landscape. The idea of a "regulatory stack" - layered, interoperable regulations with clear interfaces - is an in/acc contribution to this discussion.
Digital-first. All regulatory processes - applications, approvals, inspections, compliance reporting, dispute resolution - should be digital by default. This means not just putting forms online, but redesigning processes for the digital medium. A digital-first process can be tracked, audited, and analyzed in ways that a paper-based process cannot. The Shram Suvidha Portal for labor law compliance and the Parivesh portal for environmental clearances are early examples.
Outcome-based. Regulations should specify the outcome to be achieved (safety, environmental quality, consumer protection) rather than the specific means by which it must be achieved. Prescriptive regulations - which specify exactly how a factory must be laid out, what equipment must be used, how many square feet per worker - are rigid, often outdated, and stifle innovation. Outcome-based regulations are more flexible and give businesses room to find the most efficient way to achieve the required standard.
Time-bound. Regulatory approvals should have clear, binding timelines. If the regulator does not act within the specified period, the approval should be deemed granted. Several states have implemented "deemed approval" provisions for certain categories of business licenses, with positive results. The Maharashtra government's reforms in this area under the Maha-ITI framework are a useful reference.
Sunset clauses. Every regulation should have an expiry date and a mandatory review process. If a regulation cannot justify its continued existence based on evidence, it should lapse. This prevents the regulatory landscape from becoming an ever-growing accumulation of rules from different eras.
India's education crisis is not a crisis of access. It is a crisis of learning. The distinction matters.
Over the past two decades, India has successfully achieved near-universal enrollment at the primary level. The Right to Education Act of 2009, which made education a fundamental right for children aged 6-14, was the legal capstone of decades of effort to get children into schools. Gross enrollment ratios in secondary education have risen to around 80%, and in higher education to around 28%.
But enrollment is not learning. ASER data consistently shows that a significant proportion of students in Class V cannot read a Class II text fluently or do basic subtraction. The gap between what students are expected to know at each grade level and what they actually know is large and grows over time. By the time students reach secondary school, many are so far behind the curriculum that classroom instruction is incomprehensible to them. They sit in classrooms where the teacher is covering material they are not equipped to understand, gaining little and losing confidence.
The COVID-19 pandemic inflicted severe damage. School closures in India lasted longer than in most countries - over 500 days in many states. The shift to online learning was deeply unequal: students with smartphones, internet access, and educated parents could continue learning, while those without - disproportionately poor, rural, and from lower-caste families - lost months or years of learning. ASER 2022 documented significant learning losses, and recovery has been slow.
The failure of Indian education to produce learning outcomes commensurate with enrollment is not a mystery. The causes are well-documented:
Curriculum overload. Indian curricula attempt to cover far too much material, leaving insufficient time for mastery of fundamentals. The emphasis is on breadth over depth, on memorization over understanding, on covering the syllabus over ensuring comprehension.
Examination-driven pedagogy. The entire system is organized around high-stakes exams - board exams in Class X and XII, entrance exams for professional courses (JEE, NEET, CLAT, CAT), and competitive exams for government employment (UPSC, SSC, state PSCs). These exams drive what is taught and how. Because they reward recall and procedural fluency over conceptual understanding and critical thinking, the system produces students who can solve pattern-matched problems but struggle with novel situations.
Teacher quality and motivation. Government school teachers in India are, on average, better paid than their counterparts in comparable developing countries. But pay alone does not ensure quality. Teacher training institutions are often of poor quality, producing graduates with inadequate subject knowledge and pedagogical skills. Posting and transfer systems are politicized. Accountability mechanisms are weak - it is extremely difficult to dismiss a permanent government teacher for poor performance. Teacher absenteeism, while it has declined in some states, remains a problem.
Language of instruction. India's linguistic diversity creates a pedagogical challenge that few other countries face. The three-language formula - mother tongue, Hindi, and English - is implemented inconsistently. Many students are taught in a language that is not their mother tongue, which research consistently shows impairs learning, particularly in early years. NEP 2020's emphasis on mother-tongue instruction in the foundational years is based on strong evidence, but implementation requires a massive investment in textbooks, teacher training, and assessment in dozens of languages.
Infrastructure gaps. Despite significant investment through programs like the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan, many government schools still lack basic infrastructure - functional toilets (particularly for girls, a factor in dropout rates), clean drinking water, electricity, internet connectivity, libraries, and science laboratories. The gap between well-equipped urban schools and poorly equipped rural ones is vast.
The National Education Policy 2020 is, on paper, an impressive document. It correctly diagnoses most of the problems described above and proposes structural reforms:
Foundational literacy and numeracy. NEP 2020 identifies the learning crisis in the early years as the most urgent problem and proposes a national mission to ensure that every child achieves foundational literacy and numeracy by Class III. The NIPUN Bharat mission, launched to implement this, represents the right priority.
5+3+3+4 structure. The new structure - five years of foundational stage (ages 3-8), three years of preparatory stage (ages 8-11), three years of middle stage (ages 11-14), and four years of secondary stage (ages 14-18) - replaces the 10+2 system and brings pre-primary education into the formal system. This is significant because research consistently shows that the years between ages 3 and 8 are critical for cognitive development.
Multidisciplinary education. NEP 2020 eliminates the rigid streaming of students into science, commerce, and humanities after Class X, allowing students to combine subjects from different streams. At the higher education level, it envisions multidisciplinary universities offering four-year undergraduate programs with multiple exit points.
Integration of vocational education. The policy proposes integrating vocational and academic education from the secondary level, ending the stigma associated with vocational training and giving students practical skills alongside academic knowledge.
Assessment reform. NEP 2020 calls for a shift from high-stakes, summative examinations to competency-based, formative assessment. Board exams are to be reformed to test conceptual understanding rather than rote memorization.
The challenge is implementation. Education is a concurrent subject, and most of the actual delivery happens through state education systems. Each state has its own pace, capacity, and political dynamics. Some states - Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha - have moved relatively quickly on certain aspects of NEP implementation. Others have moved slowly or have different priorities. The central government can provide frameworks, funding, and incentives, but it cannot implement education reform in classrooms across 29 states and 8 union territories.
Beyond NEP 2020, in/acc advocates for:
Open educational resources. India should build a comprehensive, high-quality, multilingual open educational resource (OER) platform - not as a complement to classroom instruction but as a parallel system that any student anywhere can access. The SWAYAM and DIKSHA platforms are steps in this direction, but they need to be dramatically expanded in scope, quality, and multilingual coverage.
AI-personalized learning. Adaptive learning platforms that adjust to each student's level, pace, and style can address the heterogeneity problem - the fact that students in any given classroom are at vastly different levels. These platforms should not replace teachers but augment them, providing individualized practice and feedback that a single teacher with 40 students cannot.
Vernacular-first digital content. The vast majority of high-quality educational content on the internet is in English. For an Indian student whose mother tongue is Odia or Assamese or Konkani, this is a barrier. in/acc advocates for a massive investment in creating and curating educational content in all 22 scheduled languages and as many other languages as feasible.
Teacher professional development. No reform will succeed without improving teacher quality. in/acc advocates for continuous, technology-enabled professional development for teachers - peer learning networks, video-based coaching, subject-specific training, and regular assessment of teacher competence.
Credential portability and verification. India's higher education system produces millions of degrees and certificates, many of which are difficult to verify and of uncertain quality. A blockchain-based credential verification system - building on DigiLocker - could make credentials portable, verifiable, and trustworthy, reducing information asymmetry in the labor market.
India's healthcare challenges can be summarized in a few stark comparisons:
- Physicians per 1,000 people: India: 0.7; China: 2.2; Brazil: 2.3; UK: 3.0; Germany: 4.4
- Nurses and midwives per 1,000: India: 1.7; China: 3.1; Thailand: 3.0; Japan: 12.1
- Hospital beds per 1,000: India: 0.5; China: 4.3; Brazil: 2.1; global average: 2.9
- Health expenditure as % of GDP: India: ~2.1%; China: ~5.4%; Brazil: ~9.6%; global average: ~6.5%
- Out-of-pocket expenditure as % of total health spending: India: ~48%; China: ~27%; Thailand: ~11%
The last number is perhaps the most telling. When nearly half of all health spending comes out of patients' pockets, health shocks are economic shocks. The National Health Accounts data shows that catastrophic health expenditure - defined as out-of-pocket spending exceeding 10% of household consumption - pushes an estimated 55-60 million Indians into poverty every year. Healthcare costs are the single largest driver of impoverishment in India.
India's healthcare crisis is fundamentally a supply-side crisis. There are not enough hospitals, not enough doctors, not enough nurses, and not enough diagnostic facilities, particularly in rural areas and in the poorer states.
Medical education. India has roughly 700 medical colleges producing about 100,000 MBBS graduates per year. This sounds like a lot, but it is insufficient for a country of 1.4 billion. Moreover, the distribution is severely skewed: southern states have far more medical colleges per capita than northern ones. The quality of many private medical colleges is poor. The high cost of medical education - a seat in a private medical college can cost ₹1 crore or more - creates a system where the ability to become a doctor depends more on family wealth than on talent.
The specialist gap. India has severe shortages of specialists - surgeons, anesthesiologists, radiologists, oncologists, psychiatrists. Many district hospitals lack even basic specialists. Community Health Centers, which are supposed to provide specialist care at the block level, are often staffed by only a general practitioner or not at all.
Nursing and allied health. The nursing workforce is inadequate in both quantity and quality. Nursing education has expanded rapidly, but many nursing schools are poorly equipped and poorly staffed. Allied health professionals - physiotherapists, lab technicians, radiographers, pharmacists - are similarly in short supply.
Primary healthcare. India's primary healthcare system - the network of sub-centres, primary health centres (PHCs), and community health centres (CHCs) that is supposed to provide first-contact care to rural populations - is the weakest link. Many PHCs are non-functional or understaffed. Health and Wellness Centres, established under Ayushman Bharat to upgrade existing facilities and provide comprehensive primary care, are a step forward but need sustained investment.
Telemedicine. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of telemedicine in India. The Telemedicine Practice Guidelines, issued in 2020, created a regulatory framework for remote consultations. eSanjeevani, the government's telemedicine platform, has facilitated over 100 million consultations. But telemedicine at scale requires reliable internet connectivity (still lacking in many rural areas), digital literacy among both providers and patients, and integration with the broader health system.
AI diagnostics. AI-assisted diagnostic tools are particularly promising for India because they can potentially substitute for specialist capacity that does not exist. AI systems that can read chest X-rays, retinal scans, skin lesion images, or pathology slides with near-specialist accuracy could dramatically expand diagnostic capability in facilities that lack specialist doctors. Several Indian startups and research groups are developing such tools, and some are in clinical use.
Health data infrastructure. The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) is building the infrastructure for a national health data ecosystem - Ayushman Bharat Health Account (health IDs), health facility registry, health professional registry, and protocols for sharing health records across providers. This infrastructure could transform healthcare delivery by giving doctors access to patients' medical histories, enabling continuity of care, and generating population-level data for public health planning. But it requires widespread adoption by both public and private providers, which is still early.
Drug supply chain. Counterfeit and substandard medicines are a significant problem in India. Blockchain-based track-and-trace systems for pharmaceutical supply chains could improve drug safety by enabling verification of authenticity at every point from manufacturer to patient.
Massively expand medical and nursing education. India needs to at least double the number of medical college seats and triple the number of nursing graduates within a decade. This requires both public investment and sensible regulation of private institutions.
Invest in primary healthcare. Strengthening the PHC and Health and Wellness Centre network should be the top priority. Primary healthcare is the most cost-effective level of care and the foundation on which everything else depends.
Implement universal health coverage. Ayushman Bharat provides hospitalization insurance for the bottom 40%. The next step is to expand coverage to the "missing middle" - the population that is neither poor enough to qualify for government insurance nor wealthy enough to afford private insurance.
Reduce out-of-pocket spending. The combination of expanded insurance coverage, strengthened public facilities, and regulated pricing can reduce the catastrophic health expenditure that pushes millions into poverty every year.
Leverage technology for access. Telemedicine, AI diagnostics, and digital health records should be deployed at scale, particularly in underserved areas.
India's labor market is characterized by a paradox: employers report difficulty finding skilled workers, while millions of educated young people report difficulty finding jobs. The gap between what the education system produces and what the labor market demands is the employability gap.
The India Skills Report and various employer surveys consistently find that a significant share of graduates are not employable in their field of study without additional training. Engineering graduates, who were once virtually guaranteed employment, now face a market where only a fraction find jobs in engineering. The problem is not a shortage of degrees but a shortage of skills - both technical skills (coding, design, manufacturing processes) and soft skills (communication, teamwork, problem-solving, adaptability).
Over 80% of India's workforce is employed in the informal sector - without written contracts, social security, or legal protections. The informal sector ranges from subsistence agriculture to street vending to small workshops to domestic work. It includes highly skilled artisans and completely unskilled laborers. It is not a monolith, but it shares the common characteristic of being outside the formal institutional framework.
Informality is rational. For small enterprises, the costs of formality - tax compliance, labor law compliance, regulatory approvals, record-keeping - exceed the benefits. The benefits of formality - access to credit, legal protection, government contracts, social security for employees - are often theoretical rather than practical. Banks do not lend to small businesses easily. Courts do not resolve disputes quickly. Social security schemes are bureaucratic and difficult to access.
The in/acc approach to the informal economy is not to formalize it by force - which simply drives activity further underground - but to make formality more attractive by reducing its costs and increasing its benefits. Digital infrastructure is key: simplified digital tax filing, automated compliance, easy access to credit through the Account Aggregator framework, and social security portability through schemes like e-Shram can reduce the cost of formality while increasing its benefits.
India's labor law framework is a thicket of over 40 central laws and numerous state laws, many of them dating from the colonial or immediate post-independence era. The four labor codes - the Code on Wages (2019), the Industrial Relations Code (2020), the Code on Social Security (2020), and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code (2020) - were enacted to consolidate and simplify this framework. As of early 2024, they have not been fully implemented, partly because the states need to frame rules under the codes and partly because of political sensitivities.
The labor codes represent progress in simplification, but the fundamental tension remains: between flexibility (which employers need to respond to market conditions) and security (which workers need to plan their lives). The in/acc position is that this tension can be resolved not by choosing one side but by building infrastructure - portable social security, robust unemployment insurance, effective skilling systems - that gives workers security even in a more flexible labor market. The Danish "flexicurity" model is a useful reference, though it cannot be transplanted wholesale to Indian conditions.
The gig economy - delivery drivers, ride-hailing drivers, freelance professionals on digital platforms - is growing rapidly in India. Estimates vary, but India's gig workforce is among the largest in the world, particularly in urban areas.
Platform work offers flexibility and income opportunities, particularly for workers who might not find formal employment. But it also creates a new category of precarity: gig workers are typically classified as independent contractors, not employees, which means they have no access to social security, health insurance, paid leave, or the protections of labor law.
The Code on Social Security (2020) includes provisions for extending social security to gig and platform workers, but the implementation mechanisms are still being developed. Several states have begun regulating platform work, with varying approaches.
in/acc advocates for a framework that:
- Ensures social security portability for gig workers, funded by contributions from platforms, workers, and the government
- Provides transparent algorithmic governance - workers should understand how the algorithms that determine their earnings, ratings, and deactivation work
- Enables collective bargaining or representation for gig workers without requiring traditional trade union structures
- Preserves the flexibility that makes platform work attractive while providing a basic floor of protections
India is urbanizing rapidly but unevenly. Roughly 35% of the population is currently classified as urban, a share that is expected to rise to 40-45% by 2036 and to over 50% by mid-century. In absolute numbers, this means that India's urban population will grow by an estimated 300-400 million people over the next two to three decades.
This is an urban transition of a scale and speed that human history has rarely seen. Only China's urbanization in the 1980s-2020s is comparable, and China had the advantage of a centralized, authoritarian state that could plan and execute urban infrastructure at a pace that India's democratic, federal system cannot match.
The quality of this urban transition will determine much of India's future. Cities that are well-planned, well-governed, and well-served by infrastructure and public services are engines of productivity, innovation, and social mobility. Cities that are congested, polluted, poorly served, and unequally governed are traps - particularly for the poor, who pay disproportionately for the failures of urban governance through longer commutes, unsafe housing, inadequate water and sanitation, and exposure to pollution.
India's urban governance is arguably its weakest institutional link. The 74th Constitutional Amendment (1992) was supposed to empower urban local bodies (ULBs) by devolving functions, functionaries, and funds to elected municipal governments. Three decades later, the devolution remains largely incomplete.
Most Indian municipalities are starved of fiscal resources. Own-revenue sources - primarily property tax and user charges - are underutilized because of political resistance to realistic property valuations and tax collection. Transfers from state governments are often delayed, conditional, and insufficient. Municipal borrowing is limited by poor creditworthiness.
Institutional capacity is weak. Many municipalities lack qualified urban planners, engineers, financial managers, and project management professionals. Decision-making is often centralized at the state level, with parastatals (development authorities, housing boards, water supply boards) handling functions that should logically be municipal responsibilities.
The result is that India's cities are, with a few exceptions, poorly planned and poorly governed. Master plans, where they exist, are often outdated, unrealistic, or unimplemented. Building regulations are complex and poorly enforced, creating incentives for unauthorized construction. Public transportation is inadequate - despite the expansion of metro rail in several cities, the vast majority of urban commuters depend on overcrowded buses, autorickshaws, and two-wheelers. Water supply is intermittent in most cities, with an average of a few hours per day rather than the 24/7 supply that is standard in well-governed cities globally. Sewage treatment capacity falls far short of what is generated. Solid waste management, despite the Swachh Bharat Mission's achievements in reducing open defecation, remains inadequate in most cities.
The Smart Cities Mission, launched in 2015, aimed to develop 100 cities through a combination of retrofitting, redevelopment, and greenfield development. The mission brought federal attention and resources to urban development, and produced genuine improvements in specific areas - particularly through the deployment of integrated command and control centres, improved street lighting, and pedestrian-friendly zones in some cities.
But the mission also revealed the limitations of the project-based approach to urban transformation. Smart city projects often addressed visible, high-profile problems while leaving the underlying governance and infrastructure challenges untouched. A city can have a state-of-the-art command centre and still lack 24/7 water supply. A pedestrian plaza is pleasant but does not solve the daily commuting nightmare of millions.
The in/acc lesson from the Smart Cities Mission is that technology is necessary but not sufficient for urban transformation. What cities need most is not smart technology but smart governance - empowered municipalities with adequate resources, qualified staff, and the authority to plan and manage their cities.
Fiscal empowerment of municipalities. Property tax reform, user charge rationalization, and greater fiscal autonomy for urban local bodies are prerequisites for better urban governance. Technology can help: GIS-based property mapping, automated valuation, and digital payment systems can dramatically improve property tax collection.
Transit-oriented development. Urban planning should be organized around public transportation corridors, with high-density, mixed-use development concentrated around transit stations. This reduces car dependence, shortens commutes, and makes public transportation financially viable.
Land reform for urbanization. India's urban land markets are dysfunctional. Land records are unclear, title insurance barely exists, and conversion of agricultural land to urban use is a Byzantine process that invites corruption. Digitized, verified land records linked to Aadhaar and accessible through a public registry could transform urban land markets.
Affordable housing. The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban) has made progress, but the affordable housing deficit remains enormous. Innovative approaches - rental housing, micro-housing, incremental construction supported by micro-loans, and employer-provided housing - need to complement the ownership-focused model.
India's logistics costs are estimated at 14-16% of GDP, significantly higher than the 8-10% typical of advanced economies and the 10-12% typical of China. This is a drag on competitiveness that affects every sector - from agriculture (where post-harvest losses are estimated at 20-30% for perishables) to manufacturing (where high logistics costs offset the advantage of lower labor costs) to e-commerce (where last-mile delivery costs are high).
The causes are multiple: inadequate road and rail infrastructure (despite massive investment through the Bharatmala and PM Gati Shakti programs), fragmented trucking industry (with most trucks owned by small operators running one or two vehicles), complex interstate regulatory requirements (which are being streamlined by GST and the National Logistics Policy), inadequate warehousing (particularly cold chain infrastructure for perishables), and low penetration of technology in logistics operations.
India has invested heavily in road infrastructure over the past two decades. The National Highways network has expanded significantly, with the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) building highways at a pace of 25-30 km per day in recent years. The quality of national highways has improved dramatically. The Bharatmala Pariyojana, with an investment of over ₹5 lakh crore, aims to build 65,000 km of highways including economic corridors, inter-corridors, and feeder routes.
But the road network suffers from unevenness. National highways are generally good; state highways and district roads are often poor. The "last mile" - from the main highway to the farm, factory, or home - is frequently the weakest link. Road maintenance is inadequate, with many roads deteriorating within years of construction. Toll collection, while increasingly electronic (FASTag), still creates bottlenecks.
Indian Railways, with over 68,000 km of track, is one of the largest rail networks in the world. It is also one of the most stressed. Passenger traffic is cross-subsidized by freight traffic, making rail freight uncompetitive with road freight on many routes. Line utilization on key corridors exceeds 100%, creating congestion that slows both passenger and freight trains. The Dedicated Freight Corridors (Eastern and Western), which are nearing completion, will provide much-needed capacity for freight movement.
The high-speed rail project (Mumbai-Ahmedabad) and the Vande Bharat semi-high-speed trains represent aspirations for modernization. But the most impactful investment may be in more mundane improvements: increasing line capacity on congested corridors, improving connectivity to ports and industrial clusters, reducing transit times through operational efficiency, and modernizing signaling systems.
India's logistics system suffers from poor integration between modes. Road, rail, air, and waterways operate largely in silos, with inadequate physical and digital connectivity between them. The PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan, launched in 2021, aims to address this by creating a digital platform for integrated infrastructure planning across ministries and modes. The National Logistics Policy, launched in 2022, sets targets for reducing logistics costs and improving logistics performance.
in/acc advocates for:
Unified logistics data infrastructure. A digital platform - building on the Gati Shakti model - that provides real-time visibility into the movement of goods across all modes, enabling better planning, routing, and coordination.
Cold chain development. India's cold chain infrastructure is woefully inadequate for a country that is the world's largest producer of milk and the second-largest producer of fruits and vegetables. Investment in cold storage, refrigerated transport, and temperature-controlled logistics can dramatically reduce post-harvest losses and improve farmer incomes.
Technology for the trucking industry. Digital freight matching platforms (connecting shippers with carriers), GPS tracking, electronic toll collection, and driver management systems can improve the efficiency of India's highly fragmented trucking industry. Several startups are working on this, and the National Logistics Policy encourages digitization.
India's energy challenge is perhaps the most vivid example of the triadic tension between acceleration, inclusion, and sustainability.
On one hand, India needs massively more energy. Per capita electricity consumption is roughly 1,200 kWh per year - about one-third of the world average and one-tenth of the US average. Hundreds of millions of Indians still use biomass (wood, dung, crop residues) for cooking, with devastating health consequences - indoor air pollution from biomass cooking is estimated to cause hundreds of thousands of premature deaths annually. Universal access to modern energy services - reliable electricity, clean cooking fuel, and adequate heating and cooling - is a prerequisite for human development.
On the other hand, India is already the world's third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and emissions are growing. Coal remains the backbone of India's electricity system, accounting for roughly 70% of generation. India's nationally determined contribution under the Paris Agreement commits to 50% non-fossil fuel installed capacity by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2070. These targets are ambitious in the context of India's development needs but insufficient in the context of global climate science.
The good news is that the economics of renewable energy have shifted dramatically in India's favor. Solar power tariffs have fallen from ₹17/kWh in 2010 to under ₹3/kWh in recent auctions - making solar the cheapest source of new electricity generation in most of India. Wind power is similarly competitive. India has over 180 GW of installed renewable energy capacity (including large hydro) and has set targets of 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030.
The challenge is integration. Solar and wind are intermittent - they generate power when the sun shines and the wind blows, not necessarily when demand peaks. Managing this intermittency requires a combination of:
- Energy storage: Battery storage costs have fallen sharply but remain expensive at the scale needed to balance India's grid. Pumped hydro storage, which uses surplus electricity to pump water uphill and releases it through turbines when needed, is a more mature technology with significant potential in India's hilly terrain.
- Grid flexibility: A smarter, more flexible grid that can rapidly ramp conventional generation up and down to balance renewable variability. This requires investment in grid infrastructure, smart meters, and demand response systems.
- Green hydrogen: For sectors that are difficult to electrify - heavy industry, long-haul transport, chemical feedstocks - green hydrogen (produced from renewable electricity through electrolysis) offers a potential pathway. India's National Green Hydrogen Mission, with an initial outlay of ₹19,744 crore, aims to make India a global hub for green hydrogen production and export.
The energy transition extends well beyond electricity. Key dimensions include:
Clean cooking. The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana has distributed over 10 crore LPG connections to poor households, dramatically expanding access to clean cooking fuel. But sustained usage is a challenge - refill rates suggest that many beneficiaries continue to use biomass alongside LPG, often because of cost. The long-term solution may be electric cooking (using induction stoves powered by renewable electricity), but this requires reliable power supply and affordable appliances.
Electric mobility. India's FAME scheme (Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric Vehicles) and various state-level incentives are accelerating EV adoption, particularly in two-wheelers and three-wheelers. The EV transition in two-wheelers is particularly important because they are the most common motorized vehicle in India. Electric buses are being deployed in several cities. Electric cars are still a small share of sales but growing rapidly.
Industrial decarbonization. India's industrial sector - steel, cement, chemicals, aluminum - is energy-intensive and heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Decarbonizing these sectors will require a combination of electrification (where possible), green hydrogen (for high-temperature processes), carbon capture (for unavoidable emissions), and circular economy approaches (reducing demand for primary materials through recycling and reuse).
Energy and climate are the most prominent environmental challenges, but India faces pressure on multiple ecological boundaries:
Water. India is water-stressed, and the stress is worsening. Groundwater, which supplies roughly 80% of domestic water and 60% of irrigation, is being depleted faster than it is recharged in many regions. The Central Ground Water Board classifies a significant number of assessment units as overexploited. River pollution remains severe despite decades of clean-up programs (Namami Gange, National River Conservation Plan). Water allocation conflicts between states (Cauvery, Krishna, Narmada) and between agriculture, industry, and urban use are intensifying.
Air quality. Fourteen of the world's fifteen most polluted cities (by PM2.5 concentration) are in India. Air pollution is estimated to reduce average life expectancy in India by several years. The sources are multiple: vehicular emissions, industrial pollution, construction dust, crop residue burning, and coal-fired power plants. The National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) has set targets for reduction in particulate matter concentrations in 131 cities, but progress has been uneven.
Biodiversity. India is one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries, home to roughly 7-8% of all recorded species. But biodiversity is under pressure from habitat loss, urbanization, agricultural intensification, and climate change. Protected areas cover roughly 5% of India's land area - below the global average and far below the 30% target proposed under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Waste. India generates roughly 62 million tonnes of solid waste annually, of which only about 40% is processed. Plastic waste, e-waste, and biomedical waste management remain inadequate. The Swachh Bharat Mission has made significant progress on sanitation, but solid waste management in cities remains a challenge.
in/acc takes the position that India's energy transition and ecological challenges are not constraints on development but opportunities for leapfrogging. Just as India leapfrogged landline telephony to go straight to mobile, and leapfrogged branch banking to go straight to digital payments, India can leapfrog fossil-fuel-intensive industrial development to build a cleaner, more efficient economy.
This requires:
- Massive investment in renewable energy and storage - continued policy support, grid modernization, and industrial policy for domestic manufacturing of solar panels, batteries, and electrolyzers
- Rational pricing of environmental externalities - carbon pricing, water pricing, and pollution charges that reflect true costs
- Circular economy policies - extended producer responsibility, recycling mandates, and incentives for waste reduction
- Nature-based solutions - afforestation, wetland restoration, sustainable agriculture practices that sequester carbon while improving livelihoods
- Just transition - ensuring that coal-dependent workers and communities are not left behind as the energy system transitions
India's financial inclusion story is one of its most impressive development achievements. The Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM) trinity has brought hundreds of millions of previously unbanked Indians into the formal financial system:
- Jan Dhan Yojana (2014): Over 50 crore bank accounts opened under the scheme, with total deposits exceeding ₹2 lakh crore. While some accounts are dormant, the vast majority are active and used for receiving government transfers.
- Aadhaar: Enables eKYC (electronic Know Your Customer), reducing the cost and time of account opening from days to minutes.
- Mobile: Smartphone penetration in India has crossed 700 million, and mobile internet users number over 800 million. This is the interface through which financial services reach the last mile.
UPI has added a payments layer on top of this foundation. The combination of universal bank accounts, digital identity, mobile connectivity, and instant digital payments has created a financial inclusion infrastructure that is the envy of the developing world.
But inclusion in the basic sense - having a bank account and being able to make digital payments - is only the beginning. The deeper dimensions of financial inclusion - access to credit, insurance, investment, and pension products - remain significantly underdeveloped.
India's total credit-to-GDP ratio is roughly 55-60%, compared to over 180% in China, 120% in the US, and 80-100% in most upper-middle-income countries. The gap is particularly severe for small and micro enterprises (MSMEs), which employ roughly 110 million people and contribute over 30% of GDP but receive a disproportionately small share of formal credit.
The reasons for the credit gap are structural:
Information asymmetry. Lenders cannot assess the creditworthiness of borrowers who lack formal financial histories, audited financial statements, or collateral. This excludes the vast majority of small enterprises and individuals.
High cost of service. The cost of originating, underwriting, and servicing small loans through traditional banking processes is high relative to the loan size, making small lending unprofitable.
Risk aversion. Indian banks, scarred by episodes of non-performing assets (NPAs), tend to be conservative in lending to small borrowers. The NPA crisis of the mid-2010s, which saw gross NPAs in the banking system rise to over 10% of advances, made banks even more cautious.
Collateral dependence. Indian lending is heavily collateral-dependent, typically requiring land or property as security. This excludes borrowers who lack titled assets - which is a large share of the population, given the deficiencies in India's land records system.
The Account Aggregator framework, launched in 2021, addresses the information asymmetry problem by enabling consent-based sharing of financial data. When a borrower can share their bank transaction history, GST filings, and other financial data with a lender digitally, the lender can assess creditworthiness based on cash flows rather than collateral. This is a paradigm shift in lending that could unlock credit for millions of small businesses.
India is severely underinsured. Insurance penetration (premiums as a percentage of GDP) is roughly 4%, compared to a global average of over 7%. Life insurance penetration is around 3%, and non-life insurance penetration is around 1%. Health insurance coverage, while expanding through Ayushman Bharat and commercial policies, still leaves a large share of the population exposed to catastrophic health expenditure.
Agricultural insurance is particularly important given the vulnerability of Indian farmers to weather shocks. The Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) provides crop insurance at subsidized premiums, and has enrolled hundreds of millions of farmer applications. But the scheme has been criticized for high claims ratios in some states, delayed claim settlements, and inadequate coverage of all risks. Technology - particularly satellite-based crop monitoring and weather-indexed insurance - can improve the accuracy and speed of agricultural insurance.
India's capital markets have deepened significantly. The number of demat accounts crossed 15 crore in 2024, up from roughly 4 crore in 2020. Mutual fund assets under management have grown to over ₹50 lakh crore. SIP (Systematic Investment Plan) contributions now exceed ₹20,000 crore per month. The democratization of capital market participation - enabled by discount brokers, mobile trading apps, and financial literacy content on social media - is a genuine structural shift.
But participation remains concentrated. The vast majority of demat accounts and mutual fund investments come from urban India, from the salaried middle class, and from a relatively small number of states (Maharashtra, Gujarat, Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu). Rural India, agricultural households, and workers in the informal sector remain largely outside the capital markets.
in/acc advocates for:
Expanding the Account Aggregator ecosystem to cover more data sources and more use cases, making cash-flow-based lending the norm rather than the exception.
Micro-insurance and parametric insurance products that are affordable, easy to understand, and automatically triggered - no claim filing, no paperwork, just a payout when the insured event (a flood, a drought, a hospitalization) is verified through digital data.
Financial literacy at scale - not through classroom instruction (which has limited effectiveness) but through product design that educates through use, and through digital content in vernacular languages.
Pension and retirement saving for the informal sector - building on the Atal Pension Yojana and National Pension System, but with simpler enrollment, more flexible contribution schedules, and integration with gig economy platforms.
India's agrarian economy is a paradox of plenty and poverty. India is the world's largest producer of milk, the second-largest producer of fruits, vegetables, rice, wheat, and cotton, and among the top producers of sugarcane, tea, coffee, and spices. Its agricultural output is enormous.
Yet farming is, for most Indians who practice it, a livelihood of last resort. Average farm incomes are low. The average landholding is roughly 1.08 hectares and declining as land is subdivided across generations. A significant share of farming households earn below the poverty line from farming alone and depend on non-farm income to survive. Farmer suicides, driven by debt, crop failure, and hopelessness, remain a persistent tragedy - the National Crime Records Bureau records thousands of farmer and agricultural laborer suicides every year.
The causes are structural and deeply entrenched:
Fragmented landholdings. The average holding size has declined from 2.28 hectares in 1970-71 to 1.08 hectares in 2015-16, and is almost certainly smaller now. Small and marginal farmers (with holdings below 2 hectares) account for over 86% of all holdings but own only about 47% of agricultural land. Fragmentation reduces economies of scale, makes mechanization difficult, and limits bargaining power in input and output markets.
Distorted markets. The APMC (Agricultural Produce Market Committee) framework, which requires farmers to sell through regulated mandis, was designed to protect farmers from exploitation by middlemen. In practice, it created a system of licensed intermediaries who extracted rents while providing limited value. The commission agents (arthiyas) who dominate many mandis have strong political connections and resist reform. The three farm laws of 2020, which attempted to create alternatives to the APMC system, were repealed in 2021 after prolonged farmer protests - a political outcome that, whatever its merits, left the underlying market distortions intact.
Subsidy addiction. Indian agriculture is sustained by an enormous apparatus of subsidies - for fertilizers, electricity, water, credit, and procurement at minimum support prices (MSPs). The fertilizer subsidy alone exceeds ₹2 lakh crore in some years. These subsidies distort input use (excessive use of urea relative to other nutrients, overexploitation of groundwater for irrigation), misallocate resources (encouraging water-intensive crops like paddy and sugarcane in water-scarce regions), and are fiscally unsustainable. But they are politically untouchable, because any reduction in subsidies is perceived as anti-farmer.
The MSP-procurement complex. The minimum support price and government procurement system, which guarantees a floor price for key crops, is crucial for food security (through the Public Distribution System and now the PM Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana). But it creates perverse incentives: farmers concentrate on crops that are procured (primarily wheat and rice), leading to overproduction of cereals and underproduction of pulses, oilseeds, fruits, and vegetables. The procurement system also imposes enormous fiscal and logistical costs and contributes to the environmental problems of the Punjab-Haryana agricultural model (groundwater depletion, stubble burning, soil degradation).
Land is India's most unreformed factor market. The problems are interrelated:
Unclear titles. India does not have a system of guaranteed land titles. What exists is a system of registered deeds - documents recording transactions - that does not guarantee the validity of the underlying title. This means that any land transaction carries the risk of a title dispute. Banks are reluctant to lend against land that has unclear title. Investors are reluctant to buy land for industrial or commercial use without title certainty.
Incomplete digitization. Land records in India have historically been maintained on paper, in revenue offices, in formats that vary across states. The Digital India Land Records Modernization Programme (DILRMP) has made progress in digitizing records, but the process is incomplete, data quality varies, and many states have not yet linked their textual records with spatial (map) data.
Land acquisition. The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, replaced the colonial-era Land Acquisition Act of 1894 with a framework that provides better compensation and protections for landowners. But the process remains slow, contentious, and frequently litigated. Major infrastructure projects regularly face delays of years due to land acquisition issues.
Agricultural land conversion. Converting agricultural land to non-agricultural use requires permissions that are slow to obtain and prone to corruption. This restricts the supply of urban land, drives up urban real estate prices, and creates incentives for illegal conversion.
Land records reform. Comprehensive digitization of land records, linking textual and spatial data, moving toward a system of guaranteed titles (as Andhra Pradesh has attempted with its land titling act), and making verified records accessible through a digital platform. This is a precondition for improving credit access, reducing land disputes, and enabling efficient land markets.
Market reform. Creating genuine alternatives to the APMC system - farmer-producer organizations (FPOs) that aggregate produce and bargain collectively, digital platforms that connect farmers directly with buyers, contract farming arrangements that provide price certainty, and a warehousing and logistics infrastructure that enables farmers to store produce and sell when prices are favorable rather than at the moment of harvest.
Subsidy rationalization. Gradually shifting from input subsidies (which distort production decisions) to direct income transfers (which give farmers freedom to make their own production decisions). The PM-KISAN scheme, which provides ₹6,000 per year to small farmer families, is a step in this direction, though the amount is modest.
Precision agriculture. India's small farm sizes make traditional mechanization difficult, but technology-enabled precision agriculture - using sensors, drones, satellite imagery, and AI to optimize irrigation, fertilizer application, and pest management - can improve yields and reduce costs even on small holdings.
India's manufacturing sector has been a persistent underperformer relative to the economy's potential and the country's development needs. Manufacturing's share of GDP has been roughly flat at 15-17% for decades - a far cry from the 25% target that successive governments have articulated.
The composition of Indian manufacturing is revealing. India has globally competitive firms in sectors like pharmaceuticals (India is the "pharmacy of the world," producing a large share of the world's generic drugs), automobiles (Tata Motors, Mahindra, Bajaj, Hero are significant players), steel (Tata Steel, JSW, SAIL), and IT hardware (to a limited extent). But these islands of competence exist alongside a vast ocean of small, low-productivity, informal manufacturing units that employ the bulk of manufacturing workers.
The "missing middle" - medium-sized firms that are large enough to be productive but small enough to be numerous - is a structural feature of Indian manufacturing. Indian firms either stay small (to avoid regulatory thresholds, labor law requirements, and tax obligations) or become very large (where the benefits of formality outweigh the costs). The result is a bimodal distribution that is bad for employment, productivity, and competitiveness.
The Make in India initiative (2014) and the Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme (2020 onwards) represent India's most significant industrial policy interventions in decades. PLI provides financial incentives to manufacturers who achieve specified production and investment targets in designated sectors - including electronics, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, automobiles and auto components, textiles, food processing, telecom equipment, solar panels, and batteries.
The results are mixed so far. Electronics manufacturing has seen significant growth, driven by the PLI scheme and by Apple's decision to shift some iPhone manufacturing to India through its contract manufacturers (Foxconn, Pegatron, Tata Electronics). India's electronics exports have grown substantially. The mobile phone manufacturing ecosystem has expanded.
But the PLI approach has limitations. It is inherently selective - the government picks sectors and firms to incentivize, which creates risks of misallocation and rent-seeking. It does not address the horizontal constraints (infrastructure, logistics, labor laws, regulatory burden) that affect all manufacturing. And it is expensive - the total outlay for PLI schemes across 14 sectors is roughly ₹2 lakh crore.
The global shift toward supply chain diversification - often described as "China+1" - creates a significant opportunity for Indian manufacturing. As geopolitical tensions, COVID-19 supply chain disruptions, and rising labor costs in China motivate multinational firms to diversify their manufacturing bases, India is a natural alternative: large domestic market, young workforce, English-speaking managers and engineers, improving infrastructure, and a relatively stable democratic governance framework.
But capturing the China+1 opportunity requires India to address the constraints that have historically held back manufacturing:
- Infrastructure: Power, water, logistics, and industrial land with clear titles and adequate infrastructure
- Regulatory simplification: Reducing the compliance burden, particularly for labor and environmental regulations, without compromising on worker safety or environmental standards
- Skill development: Ensuring a workforce with the technical skills that modern manufacturing requires
- Trade facilitation: Reducing the time and cost of customs clearance, certification, and export logistics
- Scale: Encouraging the growth of medium-sized firms, which requires addressing the distortions that keep firms small
in/acc does not advocate for a return to the License Raj's industrial policy. The lesson of the License Raj was that the government cannot pick winners. But the lesson of East Asia - and of India's own recent experience with India Stack - is that the government can build infrastructure, set standards, and create the conditions for competitiveness.
The in/acc approach to industrial policy is:
- Invest massively in horizontal enablers - infrastructure, logistics, skills, research - that benefit all manufacturing, not just selected sectors
- Use PLI-type incentives sparingly and strategically - for sectors where India has a genuine comparative advantage and where there are significant learning-by-doing effects that the market alone would underprovide
- Reduce the cost of formality - simplify regulations, digitize compliance, and make it economically rational for small firms to grow into medium-sized ones
- Integrate into global value chains - through trade agreements, trade facilitation, and alignment with international standards and certification systems
- Build domestic capabilities in frontier technologies - semiconductors, AI hardware, advanced batteries, biotechnology - where strategic autonomy is important
India's foreign economic policy has historically oscillated between autarky and engagement. The pre-1991 regime was explicitly inward-looking: high tariffs, import substitution, and minimal engagement with global trade and investment. The post-1991 regime embraced trade liberalization, but incompletely - India's average tariff levels, while much lower than before, remain higher than those of most peer economies. India stayed out of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in 2019 and has been cautious about new free trade agreements, though bilateral deals with the UAE, Australia, and the ongoing negotiations with the EU and UK suggest a more engaged posture.
India's geopolitical position is unique: a large, strategically important democracy that maintains relationships with both the US-led Western bloc and with Russia, that is a member of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation as well as the Quad, that has a complicated relationship with China (a major trade partner and a strategic rival), and that aspires to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
The "strategic autonomy" doctrine - which India has pursued under various names since Nehru's non-alignment - means maintaining the freedom to make choices based on national interest rather than bloc allegiance. In economic terms, this translates into a desire to avoid excessive dependence on any single trading partner, technology supplier, or supply chain.
India's trade-to-GDP ratio is roughly 40-45%, which is low for an economy of its size and development level. Merchandise exports have grown but remain concentrated in a few sectors: petroleum products, gems and jewelry, pharmaceuticals, IT services, textiles, and chemicals. India's share of global merchandise exports is roughly 2% - well below what its GDP share would suggest.
The causes of India's underperformance in trade are related to the manufacturing constraints discussed above: high logistics costs, regulatory complexity, infrastructure gaps, and the absence of deep integration into global value chains. India's approach to trade agreements has been cautious, partly because of genuine concerns about import competition in sensitive sectors (agriculture, dairy, small-scale industry) and partly because of political economy factors (protectionist lobbies are well-organized; export interests are diffuse).
in/acc advocates for a more proactive trade policy:
- Selective liberalization in sectors where India can benefit from competition and where consumer welfare gains are large (electronics, machinery, agricultural inputs)
- Aggressive pursuit of market access for India's competitive exports through bilateral and plurilateral trade agreements
- Trade facilitation reforms that reduce the time and cost of cross-border transactions
- Integration into global value chains through policies that attract anchor investors, develop supplier ecosystems, and build export infrastructure
Technology sovereignty is an increasingly important dimension of strategic autonomy. India's dependence on foreign technology - particularly from China and the US - creates vulnerabilities that are economic, strategic, and social.
Semiconductors. India imports virtually all of its semiconductors. The India Semiconductor Mission, with an outlay of ₹76,000 crore, aims to develop domestic manufacturing capacity. The Vedanta-Foxconn and Tata Electronics semiconductor fabrication projects represent the first steps. But semiconductor manufacturing is one of the most capital-intensive, technology-intensive, and scale-dependent industries in the world. Catching up with Taiwan, South Korea, and even China will take years, possibly decades.
Software platforms. India's IT services industry is globally dominant, but Indians are primarily users - not builders - of the platforms that mediate digital life (search, social media, e-commerce, cloud computing). ONDC represents an attempt to build sovereign digital commerce infrastructure. IndiaAI, the national AI strategy, aims to build domestic AI capabilities. But the platform economy is dominated by American and Chinese firms, and displacing them requires not just technology but network effects.
Data. India generates enormous quantities of data - financial, health, commercial, personal - that flows to servers owned by foreign companies under terms that Indian users rarely understand. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act (2023) establishes a data protection framework, but the debate about data localization, data sovereignty, and the economic value of data is far from settled.
in/acc's position on technology sovereignty is pragmatic rather than nationalistic. Complete self-sufficiency in every technology is neither feasible nor desirable. But India should build sovereign capabilities in technologies that are critical for national security (semiconductors, AI, cybersecurity, space), for economic competitiveness (manufacturing automation, biotech, clean energy), and for democratic governance (digital public infrastructure, identity, payments). Where India cannot build, it should diversify suppliers to avoid dependence on any single source.
India's linguistic diversity is staggering: 22 languages in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, over 100 languages with more than 10,000 speakers, and hundreds more with smaller speaker populations. The 2011 Census recorded 19,500 languages and dialects spoken as mother tongues, grouped into 121 languages with 10,000 or more speakers.
This diversity is a civilizational asset but a governance challenge. The language question has been politically sensitive since before independence - the anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu in the 1960s demonstrated that language policy can be existential for regional identity. The three-language formula (mother tongue, Hindi, English) is a pragmatic compromise that is implemented inconsistently.
In the digital realm, language diversity creates both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge: the vast majority of digital content, software, and AI training data is in English. Indians who do not read English fluently are at a significant disadvantage in the digital economy. The opportunity: India's language diversity, if served by digital infrastructure, represents a massive addressable market for vernacular content, services, and products.
The digital language divide in India is a form of inequality that is often invisible in development discussions but profoundly consequential. Consider:
- Most government websites and digital services are primarily in English and Hindi, with inconsistent availability in other languages
- The vast majority of useful information on the internet - from Wikipedia to academic research to YouTube tutorials - is in English
- AI systems (voice assistants, chatbots, translation tools) work best in English and a few other languages with large digital corpora; they work poorly in most Indian languages
- Programming and software development are conducted almost exclusively in English, creating a barrier for talented individuals who are not comfortable in English
- Legal documents, contracts, and regulations are often available only in English, creating information asymmetries
in/acc advocates for a comprehensive effort to build the digital commons in Indian languages:
Machine translation and NLP. India needs high-quality, open-source machine translation and natural language processing systems for all major Indian languages. The Bhashini project (India AI's language translation initiative) is a step in this direction, aiming to provide translation services across 22 scheduled languages. But the quality of machine translation depends on the size and quality of the training data, and many Indian languages lack the large digital text corpora that state-of-the-art models require. Building these corpora - through digitization of existing texts, creation of new content, and crowdsourced contribution - is a foundational investment.
Vernacular content creation. Incentivizing the creation of high-quality educational, informational, and cultural content in Indian languages - on platforms like YouTube, Wikipedia, and government portals - through fellowships, competitions, and institutional support. The Wikipedia editing community in languages like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Bengali is active, but many languages have sparse coverage.
Voice interfaces. For the hundreds of millions of Indians who are more comfortable speaking than typing - and for the significant population that is not literate - voice-based interfaces to digital services are critical. Voice-based UPI payments, voice-based government service access, and voice-based information retrieval could dramatically expand digital inclusion.
Script and input technology. Typing in Indian scripts on smartphones and computers has improved significantly with better keyboards and input methods (Google Indic Keyboard, Swiftkey, and others), but there is still room for improvement, particularly for less common scripts and for handwriting recognition.
India's cultural heritage - manuscripts, inscriptions, art, architecture, performing arts, oral traditions - is vast, diverse, and insufficiently documented. Much of it is at risk of loss due to physical deterioration, lack of conservation resources, and the death of practitioners in oral traditions.
Digital preservation - through high-resolution imaging, 3D scanning, audio and video recording, and metadata cataloging - can ensure that this heritage survives and is accessible. Several initiatives exist (the National Mission for Manuscripts, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts digital archive, various university digitization projects), but the scale of the effort required vastly exceeds current resources.
in/acc advocates for a national digital heritage mission that:
- Digitizes manuscripts, inscriptions, and artifacts across all Indian languages and traditions
- Creates open, searchable databases accessible to scholars and the public
- Documents intangible heritage - performing arts, craft traditions, oral histories - through high-quality audio and video
- Makes cultural heritage a component of digital education, so that students encounter India's civilizational depth as part of their learning
India's information ecosystem has been transformed over the past decade. The combination of cheap smartphones, cheap data (following the Jio disruption of 2016), and social media platforms has created an information environment that is more democratic and more chaotic than anything that preceded it.
On the positive side: more voices are heard than ever before. Regional language content has exploded on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and X. Independent journalists, commentators, and creators have built large audiences without the gatekeeping of traditional media. Citizen journalism - videos of police brutality, documentation of government failures, real-time reporting from disaster zones - has created accountability that was previously impossible.
On the negative side: the information ecosystem is also awash in misinformation, disinformation, hate speech, and outright fabrication. WhatsApp-driven rumor cascades have led to mob violence. Deepfakes are an emerging threat. Paid political propaganda masquerades as news. Media houses are perceived as partisan, and public trust in media has declined.
The structural challenge is that the business model of digital media incentivizes engagement over accuracy, outrage over nuance, and speed over verification. Platforms optimize for attention, and attention is captured more effectively by emotional, polarizing content than by sober, factual reporting. This is not unique to India, but it is particularly dangerous in a society with India's diversity, inequality, and history of communal tension.
Regulatory responses are fraught. The IT Rules (2021) and their subsequent amendments give the government significant power over online content, including the ability to demand takedowns and the appointment of government-nominated members to social media grievance appellate committees. The tension between free expression and content regulation is inherent and not easily resolved.
in/acc does not claim to have a simple solution to the information ecosystem challenge. But we advocate for several principles:
Support independent media. A diverse, financially sustainable, independent media ecosystem is essential for democracy. This means supporting business models (subscriptions, memberships, non-profit media) that are not dependent on engagement-based advertising, and creating legal and institutional protections for press freedom.
Media literacy. Education systems should include media literacy - the ability to evaluate sources, identify misinformation, understand how algorithms work, and navigate the information ecosystem critically - as a core competency, not an elective.
Transparent platform governance. Social media platforms that operate at scale in India should be transparent about their content moderation policies, algorithmic recommendation systems, and enforcement actions. Users should be able to understand why they are seeing particular content and how to control their information diet.
Open fact-checking infrastructure. Support for independent, non-partisan fact-checking organizations, and for technology tools that make fact-checking faster and more scalable.
Decentralized social media. The protocol-based approach that India has pioneered in payments (UPI) and commerce (ONDC) could be applied to social media: open, interoperable protocols that allow users to participate in the social web without being locked into a single platform's algorithms and policies. Protocols like ActivityPub (which powers Mastodon and the broader fediverse) and AT Protocol (which powers Bluesky) point toward this possibility.
The seven pillars of in/acc - Research Mediation, Design Proposals, Policy Advocacy, Change Management, Build & Execution, Deployment & Operations, Marketing & Consultation - are not just categories. They represent the full lifecycle of turning ideas into impact, and they are designed to provide a home for every type of contributor.
Research Mediation (Anvikshiki): The bridge between knowledge and action. India does not lack academic research on its development challenges - the body of work in economics, political science, public health, education, urban planning, and environmental science is vast. What it often lacks is the synthesis and translation of this research into forms that practitioners, policymakers, and the public can use.
Research mediators in the in/acc context are not researchers themselves (though they may be). They are synthesizers, translators, and curators. Their work products include: evidence briefs that summarize what the research says about a specific intervention; landscape surveys that map who is doing what in a given domain; data dashboards that make complex information accessible; and counter-narrative documents that challenge conventional wisdom with evidence.
Concretely, an in/acc research mediator might:
- Compile a comprehensive evidence review on the effectiveness of different approaches to groundwater management in India, synthesizing findings from hydrology, economics, and political science
- Create a data dashboard tracking the implementation of NEP 2020 across states, using publicly available data from UDISE+ and other sources
- Write an evidence brief on the fiscal implications of universal basic income proposals for India, drawing on international experience and Indian pilot studies (such as the SEWA-funded experiment in Madhya Pradesh)
Design Proposals (Kalpana): The architecture of solutions. Design proposals take the evidence and analysis produced by research mediation and turn them into concrete, implementable designs - technical specifications, system architectures, process flows, user experience designs, and economic models.
A design proposal is not a wish list. It is a detailed blueprint that specifies what will be built, how it will work, who will use it, what it will cost, and how its success will be measured. It engages with constraints - technical, fiscal, political, cultural - and proposes solutions that are feasible, not just desirable.
A design proposal might include:
- A technical architecture for a blockchain-based land registry pilot in a specific state, including data standards, governance model, integration with existing systems, and a phased implementation plan
- A system design for an AI-assisted case management tool for district courts, including the data model, algorithm design, user interface, and training requirements for court staff
- An economic model for a parametric crop insurance product using satellite data, including premium calculations, payout triggers, and a risk analysis
Policy Advocacy (Nitivada): The art of translating good ideas into good policy. Policy advocacy in the Indian context requires understanding the political economy - who benefits, who loses, who has voice, who has votes - as well as the institutional landscape - which ministry, which committee, which law, which regulation.
Policy advocates in in/acc operate at the intersection of evidence and politics. They take the evidence from research mediation and the designs from Kalpana and translate them into policy proposals that are technically sound, politically feasible, and institutionally actionable.
Policy advocacy outputs include:
- Policy briefs addressed to specific decision-makers (a state chief minister, a central ministry, a regulatory body) that propose specific interventions with evidence-based justifications
- Model legislation or regulation that can be adapted by different states
- Submissions to government consultations and parliamentary standing committees
- Op-eds and media engagements that build public support for specific reforms
Change Management (Yojana): The discipline of making change actually happen. India is not short of good ideas or even good policies. What it often lacks is the organizational capacity to implement change in complex institutional environments.
Change management in the in/acc context means:
- Stakeholder mapping and engagement for reform initiatives
- Communication strategies that build understanding and support for change
- Training and capacity building for implementers
- Monitoring implementation and identifying bottlenecks early
- Managing resistance - understanding why people resist change and addressing their concerns rather than simply overriding them
Build & Execution (Nirmana): Writing code, building prototypes, shipping products. This is where ideas become tangible. Builders in the in/acc ecosystem create the tools, platforms, and systems that embody in/acc principles.
Build projects might include:
- Open-source tools for government transparency (budget visualization, procurement tracking, complaint management)
- AI models for Indian language NLP, trained on open datasets
- Platforms for farmer-producer organizations to connect with buyers
- Mobile apps for citizen engagement with local government
- Data analysis tools for tracking in/acc metrics (GDP growth, Gini coefficient, Doughnut metrics) at the state and district level
Deployment & Operations (Vyavahara): Running infrastructure, maintaining systems, ensuring reliability. This is the unglamorous but essential work of keeping things running. In the open-source and civic tech world, many promising projects die not because the code is bad but because no one maintains them. Deployment and operations contributors ensure that what gets built stays built.
Marketing & Consultation (Samvada): Telling the story, growing the community, advising partners. The in/acc movement needs to reach people - potential contributors, policymakers, funders, media, and the general public. Marketing is not about hype; it is about clear, honest communication of what in/acc is, what it has achieved, and what it needs.
The pillars are not siloed. They form a pipeline:
- Research identifies the problem and the evidence base
- Design creates the solution architecture
- Policy creates the enabling environment
- Change management prepares the ground for implementation
- Build creates the technology and tools
- Deploy puts them into operation
- Marketing communicates the results and attracts new contributors
Not every initiative will go through all seven stages. Some will start at Build (when the technology is the bottleneck, not the policy). Some will focus entirely on Policy (when the evidence is clear but the political will is missing). The pillars are a framework for organizing contributions, not a rigid sequence.
in/acc is an open movement. Its intellectual property is in the public domain (Unlicense). Its discussions are public. Its decision-making should be transparent.
But open does not mean ungoverned. The most successful open-source projects - Linux, Apache, Wikipedia, Ethereum - all have governance structures that enable coordination, resolve disputes, set priorities, and maintain quality. in/acc needs governance too.
Transparency. All decisions, discussions, and financial flows within in/acc should be visible to the community. This includes: which projects are being prioritized and why, who is contributing what, how resources are allocated, and what outcomes are being achieved.
Subsidiarity. Decisions should be made at the lowest level of organization that is competent to make them. A local chapter should decide its own priorities. A project team should decide its own technical architecture. Central coordination should focus on setting broad direction, maintaining quality standards, and resolving conflicts - not on micromanaging projects.
Merit and contribution. Influence within in/acc should be proportional to contribution, not to status, credentials, or tenure. Someone who ships a working prototype, publishes a rigorous evidence brief, or successfully advocates for a policy change should have more voice than someone who attends meetings but produces nothing.
Intellectual honesty. in/acc must be rigorous in its use of evidence, honest about failures and limitations, and willing to change course when the evidence warrants. A movement that makes claims it cannot support, ignores inconvenient data, or refuses to admit mistakes will lose credibility - the one asset it cannot afford to lose.
Political non-alignment. in/acc is not affiliated with any political party or ideology. Its positions on specific issues are derived from evidence and analysis, not from partisan allegiance. Individual contributors may have their own political views, but in/acc as a movement takes positions based on what the evidence and its core principles (accelerate, include, sustain) support.
in/acc operates as a decentralized network, not as a hierarchical organization. The structure includes:
Core contributors: Individuals who have demonstrated sustained, high-quality contribution across one or more pillars. Core contributors participate in setting direction, reviewing proposals, and mentoring new contributors.
Project teams: Self-organizing groups that form around specific initiatives (a research project, a policy brief, a technology prototype). Project teams are responsible for their own work plans, timelines, and deliverables.
Working groups: Cross-cutting groups that coordinate across projects on specific themes (governance, metrics, technology standards, community development).
Local chapters: Geographic nodes of the community - in specific cities, states, or institutions - that organize events, recruit contributors, and adapt in/acc priorities to local contexts.
The commons: The shared intellectual resources of the movement - the manifesto, the research repository, the open-source code, the data sets, the policy briefs - that anyone can use, build upon, and contribute to.
If in/acc takes its three north stars seriously - GDP growth, Gini coefficient, Doughnut metrics - then it must be able to measure progress on all three. This requires:
GDP and economic metrics: These are well-measured by national statistical agencies (CSO/NSO, RBI). in/acc does not need to create new GDP data. What it can do is track disaggregated economic data - by state, by sector, by firm size - that reveals patterns invisible in national aggregates.
Inequality metrics: The Gini coefficient is measured through consumption expenditure surveys (NSSO/NSO) and, increasingly, through tax data (for income inequality). in/acc should track both consumption and income inequality, as well as wealth inequality (which is less well-measured in India). Spatial inequality (between states, between urban and rural areas) should be tracked alongside individual inequality.
Doughnut metrics: These require a broader data effort. On the ecological side: greenhouse gas emissions, air quality, water quality and availability, biodiversity indicators, waste generation and processing rates, land use change. On the social side: poverty rates, nutrition indicators, educational attainment, health outcomes, employment rates, housing quality, access to energy, digital connectivity, political participation, social equity indicators. Many of these are already tracked by various government agencies, but the data is scattered across different sources, published with varying frequency, and not integrated into a coherent dashboard.
in/acc proposes to build an open, publicly accessible dashboard that tracks progress on all three north stars, disaggregated by state and, where possible, by district. The dashboard would draw on publicly available data from:
- National Statistical Office (GDP, consumption, employment, poverty)
- Reserve Bank of India (financial data, credit, inflation)
- Central Pollution Control Board (air quality, water quality)
- Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (health indicators from NFHS, HMIS)
- Ministry of Education (educational data from UDISE+, AISHE)
- National Crime Records Bureau (crime, justice system data)
- Satellite and remote sensing data (land use, forest cover, agricultural conditions)
The dashboard would serve multiple purposes: as a tool for tracking national progress, as a basis for comparing state performance, as a resource for researchers and policy advocates, and as an accountability mechanism for in/acc itself - is the movement's work contributing to measurable improvement?
Any movement that claims to be evidence-based must be willing to change course when the evidence demands it. in/acc builds in course correction through:
Annual review. An annual process of reviewing the movement's priorities, strategies, and impact against the metrics dashboard. What worked? What didn't? What should change?
Project evaluation. Each project within in/acc should have clear success metrics and a defined timeline. Projects that fail to meet their metrics should be analyzed (was the metric wrong? was the approach wrong? were the assumptions wrong?) and either redesigned or discontinued.
External review. Periodic external review by independent experts - academics, practitioners, former policymakers - who can challenge the movement's assumptions and methods from outside.
Community feedback. Continuous feedback from contributors, partner organizations, and the communities that in/acc's work is intended to benefit. The voice of the beneficiary should be central to evaluation, not an afterthought.
This manifesto is not addressed to the government, though we hope policymakers will engage with it. It is not addressed to donors, though we welcome support. It is not addressed to the international community, though we value global solidarity.
This manifesto is addressed to builders. To the engineers, researchers, policy analysts, organizers, designers, writers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, farmers, and entrepreneurs who see India's challenges and want to do something about them. Who are frustrated by the gap between India's potential and its reality. Who believe that technology, properly directed, can be a force for genuine good. Who are willing to put in the work - not just the work of ideas, but the work of implementation, the unglamorous work of making things actually happen in a country of 1.4 billion people with all their diversity, complexity, and aspiration.
The window is open. India's demographics are favorable. The technology is mature. The institutional foundations - India Stack, the GST Council model, the startup ecosystem, the deepening capital markets - are in place. The global moment - with supply chains diversifying, the AI revolution accelerating, and the clean energy transition creating new industrial possibilities - is aligned with India's interests.
But windows close. The demographic dividend is time-limited. Climate change will make development harder with every passing decade. The risk of premature deindustrialization - leapfrogging manufacturing entirely and getting stuck in low-productivity services - is real. The social and political tensions that arise from persistent inequality and inadequate opportunity can erode democratic institutions and social cohesion.
We ask you to contribute what you can, where you can, in the pillar that matches your skills and inclination.
If you are a researcher, synthesize the evidence on a question that matters. If you are a designer, architect a solution. If you know policy, translate knowledge into proposals. If you can build, write the code. If you can deploy, keep the systems running. If you can communicate, tell the story.
We do not ask for perfection. We ask for iteration. We do not ask for consensus on every issue. We ask for intellectual honesty and good faith. We do not ask for full-time commitment. We ask for sustained engagement - even a few hours a month, applied consistently and with care, can produce results.
The in/acc bet is simple: that a civilization with India's human capital, cultural depth, institutional resilience, and technological capability can, within a generation, achieve a quality of life for its citizens that is qualitatively better than what exists today - more prosperous, more equal, more sustainable, more just. That this is not a fantasy but a realistic possibility, if the work is done well.
We are not naive about the obstacles. We know that vested interests will resist reforms that threaten their rents. We know that institutional change is slow, that democratic politics is messy, that implementation is harder than design, and that good intentions are not enough. We know that many movements before this one have started with ambition and ended with disillusionment.
But we also know that India has surprised the world before. The country that was written off as a "functioning anarchy" in the 1960s built a nuclear program, a space program, a world-class IT industry, and a digital payments system that processes more transactions than the rest of the world combined. The country that was told it could not feed itself became a net food exporter. The country that was patronized as a "third world" backwater is now the fifth-largest economy on the planet.
India has done hard things before. It can do them again. The question is not whether India has the capability. It is whether enough Indians will commit the effort.
This manifesto is an invitation to commit.
in/acc builds upon the philosophy and infrastructure of:
- India Stack & Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) - The model of population-scale digital public goods
- Cosmos / Interchain - Federated, sovereign, interoperable systems architecture
- Complexity Economics - Embracing uncertainty and emergent order over top-down control
- Doughnut Economics - Operating within ecological ceilings and social foundations
Inspired by the Bharat G20 2023 motto, we want to:
Accelerate / One Earth. Include / One Family. Sustain / One Future.
Pillars represent the kinds of work you can contribute to. Together, they cover the full lifecycle from idea to impact:
| # | Pillar | Sanskrit | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Research Mediation | Anvikshiki | Synthesize evidence, conduct studies, bridge academia and practice |
| 2 | Design Proposals | Kalpana | Architect solutions, write technical specs, design systems |
| 3 | Policy Advocacy | Nitivada | Translate research into policy, engage institutions and regulators |
| 4 | Change Management | Yojana | Plan transitions, manage stakeholders, drive organizational adoption |
| 5 | Build & Execution | Nirmana | Write code, build prototypes, ship products and platforms |
| 6 | Deployment & Operations | Vyavahara | Run infrastructure, maintain systems, ensure reliability |
| 7 | Marketing & Consultation | Samvada | Tell the story, grow the community, advise partners and policymakers |
Technology should be seen not just as a tool but as a fundamental building block for the future of India. Indic Acceleration is our pledge to build an India that is modern, inclusive, and sustainable - a nation that balances technological advancement with its rich cultural heritage.
This is our manifesto for an enlightened and empowered India. An India that leads the world not just in technology, but in wisdom, compassion, and progress.
We want to build a fraternity of collaborators and builders.
We want to contribute toward a more open, interoperable, sovereign, federated, inclusive, sustainable, marketable, and monetizable infrastructure for capital building by human coordination and consensus.
Join the conversation and connect with fellow builders:
- X (Twitter) Community - Live discussions, project updates, and coordination
This work is released into the public domain under the Unlicense. Copy it, remix it, build on it - no permission needed.