About the Book: India’s path has been uniquely “precocious”: choosing democracy before widespread development, prioritising high-skilled service sectors over low-skilled manufacturing, and embracing a form of globalisation that favoured the mobile elite while bypassing the poor. The socialist-inspired state morphed into a capitalist one without first securing robust public goods in infrastructure and human capital. The result: surprising successes in maintaining democracy and creating order, yet glaring inconsistencies in social and economic progress. In A Sixth of Humanity, co-authors Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian trace how India, one of the largest and most diverse countries on the planet, endeavoured to build a state, nurture an economy, transform society and forge nationhood — all at once and under universal suffrage — with rigorous research and lucid insight