aroonwithaview

What is the purpose of a government? There are many theories of state, from regulating violence to coordinating economic activity. The most salient for me in recent years has been the idea that the state is an instrument to address market failures. For a variety of well-studied reasons, individual optimizations can lead to collective disasters, so the state intervenes to restore welfare. A government that refuses to engage in these interventions, deferring to individual optimizations instead, is a failure.

By that definition, the current central government in India has been a massive failure. India has been in the throes of a textbook externality – pollution – for decades. The air in many North Indian cities is so polluted that living there is equivalent to being a chain smoker, for all intents and purposes. But there are no incentives whatsoever for an individual, a firm, an industry, or even a state government, to address this disaster. They would incur all the cost of pollution reduction with none of the benefit, because air is famously highly mobile. Thus it falls directly under the purview, and the responsibility, of the central government. In fact, the Indian central government is surprisingly well-placed to address this disaster – India is a massive geographical political entity, unlike some smaller countries like Bangladesh, which would have to depend on countries like India to solve this externality first. And yet, absolutely no progress has been made on this logically high priority task. Au contraire, the government has actively regressed by weakening rules on crackers during Diwali in order to pander to the Hindu vote base.

An important question is who shoulders the blame for this failure. There is a plausible argument to be made that Modi and his ministers are to blame, but I think that is too superficial. Yes, the proximate cause of government failure is the person who runs it, but the fortunate and unfortunate aspect of democracy is that the root cause always ends up being the people. Voters have not shown any willingness to demand change at the ballot box, and civil society has not shown any willingness to demand change on the streets or at the soapbox. Even amongst the educated class, there is barely any recognition that the air pollution is an emergency. A tragically funny example are my in-laws living in Delhi, who despite having 3 air purifiers already at home, had to be coaxed into running just one – and that one runs just in the bedroom.

What’s the solution then? I believe the only reasonable answer is that a highly motivated advocacy group, most likely composed of the younger educated class, must capture the levers of power in a coordinated manner across the country. There were some flashes of this when AAP started winning, but they seem to have run out of steam. An alternative has to come up, and move policy by personal belief rather than by voter consent. There will be political costs, and those must be paid smartly, in a way that compensates voters for their inconvenience. The answer to a political failure has to be better politics.