In the run-up to elections, the print media has highlighted the seeming prosperity of rural India relative to the economic slump in urban areas. Favorable monsoon rains, the rise in commodity prices and public works funded by the employment guarantee scheme are cited as some of the contributory factors. However, a happy coincidence of transient features does not constitute a turn-around. 

India’s economic transformation and growth have received much media attention in recent times. However, another major transformation going on in Indian society that has received much less attention is the demographic transition that the country has been undergoing since the 1960s. While India’s death rates have been falling steeply since 1911, the country’s birth rates have also started falling steeply since 1961. India’s fertility rate has declined from about six children per woman in 1961 to 2.7 today.

One of the problems that India’s new government will find itself confronting – a problem that is rapidly moving up the global geopolitical agenda – is the issue of climate change. This issue is extremely pertinent to India for a number of reasons. First, climate change is likely to hit India hard in the coming decades. Predicted impacts include water scarcity, decreased crop yields, increased risk of disease, and flooding of coastal areas. These problems will be most detrimental to India’s poorest citizens.

Manufacturing in India has truly come of age in recent times. It was appearing that it may contribute five to six percent more to the GDP until the economic crisis crippled the world. A recent survey of seven hundred manufacturing firms across the country, done for the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council, reveals that the leaders of this revolution were mid-size firms that had the right mix of product variety and volume to serve the domestic and global markets.

Once the rhetoric of electioneering dies down, the ruling coalition will have to confront a number of security related problems. The possibility of any one of the Pakistan-based groups initiating another diversionary attack on India remains high. If as expected, the incoming government will be a loose coalition of vested interests, the possibility of major policy reforms and strong determination to deal with the perpetuators is going to be negligible. The principal challenge placed before the new government will thus be to prepare for a dramatic strike.

Prior to 1989, India’s party system produced single-party majority governments based on only a plurality of the vote. Since then, over the course of the past six elections, it has produced hung parliaments and multi-party minority and/or coalition governments. This fragmentation of the Indian party has been widely noted.

Foreign policy has never been a major electoral issue in India because a vast majority of the electorate has more pressing domestic economic and social concerns. While events in the sub-continent may have some impact on domestic politics they have so far proved to be marginal.

Given the consensus that infrastructure is a key constraint for economic growth, one would expect infrastructure policy to receive a lot of attention. However, over the last five years, the record has little to show. Not only has this government continued some of the misplaced policies of its predecessor, almost all its interventions have contributed to worsening the situation.

A consensus on issues of national concern can sometimes be hard to reach, particularly in a democracy of more than a billion people; one that has countless social markers. In India, however, there seems to be a consensus of an exceptional order on the question of economic reforms. The country’s two main political blocs: the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance are closer to each other on economic reforms than not. Even the Left-ruled West Bengal is embracing economic reform despite its ideological pretensions.

Any new government that assumes office will not be short of a million suggestions about what is to be done. But we pay less attention to a prior question: How do we build up the capacity of the state to do whatever it wants? Often this is posed as a question of governance reform. But our debate over governance reform has also taken a misleading turn, because it assumes that governance reform is about implementing designs created by committees of technocrats.