> There's a meme called the "fix everything easily switch". What policies do you think are the best candidates for being a real fix everything switch in the India? Give me your top ten, your confidence, your reasoning, and why a given policy has not been implemented
quick caveat bc the meme deserves it: the "fix everything switch" framing is itself sus. afaict for most countries, including india, everyone in policy circles already KNOWS what to flip — the switch is heavy bc some politically powerful group is sitting on it. the real puzzle is always distributional, not epistemic. so "why hasn't it been done" mostly reduces to "who eats the cost." keep that in mind.
with that disclaimer, my top 10, ordered roughly by leverage × tractability:
1. judicial reform / pendency liquidation (confidence ~75%) ~50M cases pending, avg civil case takes years to decades. this kneecaps contract enforcement, deters investment, makes property rights notional, lets criminals run for parliament while undertrials rot. fix: more judges (india has ~21 per million vs ~150 in developed peers), specialized commercial benches, time-bound disposal, mandatory adr. why not done: judiciary self-governs and won't expand itself fast; politicians benefit from a slow system that protects them; lawyers profit from delays; collegium opacity. also a genuinely hard coordination problem across center/state.
2. land titles → torrens-style digital registry (~70%) something like 2/3 of civil litigation is land disputes. no clean titles → no collateralized lending for the poor, no land assembly for infra, endless rent-seeking. de soto's whole thesis basically. svamitva is a baby step. why not done: land is state subject, every reform creates losers (squatters, encroachers, those with murky claims), revenue dept babus eat well off the current ambiguity, and clean titles would expose massive elite-land-grabs from the past.
3. urban FSI/height liberalization (~65%) mumbai has an FSI of ~1.33 in most areas vs 5-15+ in singapore/nyc/tokyo. this is why your aunt's 1bhk costs ₹3cr and why bangalore sprawls into traffic infinity. unlock vertical density and you fix housing, productivity (agglomeration), AND commute-induced misery in one move. why not done: builder-politician nexus benefits from artificial scarcity; existing homeowners are NIMBY everywhere; urban local bodies are weak and captured; state govts hoard land monetization rights.
4. labor code implementation (the four codes actually taking effect) (~55%) india's "missing middle" — firms stay tiny to dodge thresholds. parliament passed the four labor codes in 2019-20 but states haven't notified rules. low confidence not bc the policy is wrong but bc implementation theater is real and elasticities are contested. why not done: unions block, opposition (and some inside) parties weaponize, and tbh some employers prefer informality bc it's cheaper than formal compliance. classic stag hunt.
5. DISCOM (power distribution) restructuring (~60%) discoms lose ~₹0.4-0.7/kWh on every unit; cross-subsidize ag with industrial tariffs which kills manufacturing competitiveness; theft is endemic. fixes are well-known: direct benefit transfer for ag power, smart meters, privatization or separation of carriage & content. bleeds into MSME viability, ev rollout, everything. why not done: free electricity wins elections, fullstop. punjab, telangana, tn, ap all do it. udAY and rdss schemes keep getting recycled. the chief ministers who'd fix this would lose the next vote.
6. foundational literacy & numeracy at scale (~65%) ASER data is brutal — chunk of grade 5 kids can't read grade 2 text. india massively expanded enrollment but learning collapsed. NIPUN bharat is the right idea; whether states execute is the question. compounds for 60+ years through one cohort's working life so the irr is unreal. why not done: education is state subject, teacher unions resist accountability, kpi has been enrollment not learning so the system looks fine on paper, and rich/middle class exited to private schools so political voice is muted.
7. agri marketing liberalization (the laws that got repealed) (~50%) APMC monopolies + MSP distortions concentrate output in wheat/rice/sugarcane (water-intensive, in punjab, of all places — peak ecological irony), keep farmers price-takers, enrich commission agents. 2020 laws tried this; protests killed them in 2021. why not done: well-organized arhtiya class + punjab/haryana farmers + opposition stitched together a coalition; modi blinked. low confidence bc the actual welfare effects of the repealed laws are contested by serious economists.
8. female labor force participation enablers (~50%) flfp is ~25% and has been falling for 20 years. doubling it would be the single biggest gdp boost on offer. it's a portmanteau policy: childcare infra, public safety, transport, eliminating regs that ban women from night shifts, etc. confidence lower bc it's not really one switch — it's like 12 switches that have to flip together. why not done: cultural/patriarchal substrate is the real bottleneck, not policy. and the policy levers that DO exist (childcare, safety) require state capacity we don't have.
9. state capacity / bureaucratic reform (~55%) india has fewer civil servants per capita than most peers and the ones we have are misallocated: too many on letterhead duties, too few in delivery roles. lateral entry, performance pay, mission-mode units, fixing the IAS generalist tyranny over specialist domains. why not done: bureaucrats design the reforms that would constrain bureaucrats. you see the problem. also the political class likes a pliable bureaucracy.
10. tax base widening + GST rationalization (~45%) india has ~2-3% of population paying income tax. GST has 4+ slabs and the 28% bracket is essentially a sin tax misapplied to normal goods. consolidate to 2 rates, ruthlessly digitize compliance, formalize the informal. why not done: every slab change angers some sectoral lobby; states fear losing revenue autonomy; the political cost of taxing the newly-included is borne by whoever does it and the benefits diffuse. classic olson logic.
honorable mentions i'd put at 30-45%: air quality enforcement (lancet says ~1.7M premature deaths/yr), trade liberalization rollback (we've been raising tariffs since ~2018, which is bad), public health spending floor at 2.5% of gdp, criminal justice reform (police-to-pop ratio is laughable).
the straussian read on all of this: notice that ~7 of the 10 are blocked by some organized minority (lawyers, arhtiyas, bureaucrats, teachers, free-power voters, builders). the technical answer is well-mapped — chief economic advisors of every stripe have written the same memos for 30 years. india's bottleneck isn't ideas, it's that democracy under conditions of weak state capacity and high inequality systematically protects rent-extracting middlemen. so the actual fix-everything switch might just be "state capacity" — which is also the hardest one to flip bc the switch is held by the people who'd lose power if it flipped. idk, take it with salt.
> what would realistically happen in 10-30 years if these were all implemented? paint the most visceral picture you can of what we'd gain and what we're losing for not doing these things. be concise.
year 10. the missing middle fills in. factories that would've been in shenzhen get built in dholera, sri city, hosur. mumbai stops being mexico city with humidity — vertical density crashes housing prices, your cousin actually buys a flat instead of doing the 90-minute virar local thing forever. discoms break even, the diesel genset chorus that scores every indian summer goes silent. courts decide cases in months. the first cohort of NIPUN-era kids hits class 8 actually able to read. female lfp at ~38%, up from 25.
year 30. gdp per capita ~$18-22k in real terms (counterfactual ~$8-10k). india is the workshop the world wanted china to stop being. the brain drain inverts — your IIT cousins start coming back bc the salary delta no longer pays for the quality-of-life delta. delhi's november sky is merely bad, not apocalyptic, bc stubble-burning farmers grow something other than rice in punjab now. tier-2 cities (indore, coimbatore, vizag) become livable in a way only south bombay used to be. the median indian woman has a bank account, a job, and fewer kids than her mother by choice. the demographic dividend was actually cashed before the window closed in ~2047.
what we're paying for NOT doing it — the visceral version:
every year of delay is ~1.7M preventable air pollution deaths. another year of grade 5 kids who can't read grade 2 text — they become grade 10 kids who can't, then 25-year-olds permanently locked out of any job above subsistence. a generation of women who finished college and then got married into a kitchen. ~200M people stuck in farms that climate change is making unviable, who'll arrive as climate refugees in cities that have no housing for them bc FSI is 1.33. the kid born in bihar in 2025 statistically dies ~10 years earlier than the kid born in kerala, and you've decided that's fine for another 30 years.
the geopolitics: china's lead becomes permanent. the LAC stays a one-sided humiliation forever. the indian passport remains the document that gets you the longest visa queue. NRIs keep telling their grandkids about india the way irish-americans tell theirs about ireland — a place of sentiment, not return.
the straussian gut-punch: india in 2055 without these reforms looks a LOT like india in 2025 with better phones. you'll see the same beggar at the same signal, just with a UPI qr code around her neck. the country becomes a place where brilliance and squalor share the same elevator and everyone pretends not to smell it. we'd have proven that 1.4 billion people, the world's largest democracy, and 5000 years of civilizational depth still can't outrun the gravitational pull of a few hundred thousand well-organized middlemen.
that's the loss. not GDP. it's the moral injury of having had the ingredients and cooked nothing.
> ok, what's the actual meta solution here that accounts for why this hasn't actually happened?
ok the honest answer requires admitting the question is malformed. there's no switch — there's a meta-game.
why this isn't a policy problem at all. every reform on that list has been written about, modelled, white-papered, NITI-aayog'd, ranganarayan-committee'd. the diagnosis isn't the bottleneck. olson nailed it in '82: stable democracies accumulate "distributional coalitions" — small groups with concentrated benefits and high organizational density (arhtiyas, IAS, bar associations, teachers' unions, free-power voters, builders) that block reforms whose benefits are diffuse. india has 75 years of accumulated sediment. the system is functioning AS DESIGNED. it's just designed to protect insiders.
so what actually breaks the equilibrium historically? five things, in order of how nice they are:
india's actual meta-strategy, which is already 30% executed: stack DPI rails + manufactured beneficiary constituencies + state-level reform labs + wait for sectoral crisis windows to force the rest. this is what's happening, it's just glacial bc the system is built for glacial. the IBC happened bc bank NPAs hit crisis. GST happened bc fiscal pressure. labor codes happened bc covid blew up the formal/informal binary. expect ag reform when monsoons fail catastrophically (~5-15 yrs), DISCOM reform when grid actually collapses (~10-20 yrs), judicial reform... never, frankly, until somebody very rich gets screwed badly enough.
the straussian punchline you're looking for. maybe the "fix everything switch" framing is itself the indian intellectual's cope. it imagines a deus ex machina bc the real answer — grind, accumulate, build parallel, wait — is psychologically unbearable for people who can see the gap clearly and live one human lifespan. the system's slowness is also why we didn't have a cultural revolution, a great leap, an emergency-that-stuck. china got rich faster and can also de-rich faster. india's pace is the price of its durability. the founders (whatever you think of them) basically chose robustness over velocity, and we've been paying the bill — and collecting the dividend — ever since.
what a person can actually do, given this. move to a reforming state (or stay and vote in one). join the formal economy (you become a stakeholder in reform). build DPI-adjacent stuff if you're technical. start or work at a firm that crosses the 100-employee threshold instead of staying small to dodge regs — you make the missing middle exist by being it. buy property (you become a voter who cares about FSI and clean titles). have a girl child and don't pull her out of the workforce. these are unsexy but they're how the constituency for reform actually grows.
the meta-solution isn't a switch. it's a slow tide. afaict the tide IS coming in — just not on the timeline of any one person's frustration with it. that's the deal. take it or emigrate (which, tellingly, is what ~2.5M indians a year now do).