ABSTRACT
How has India been doing on the economic and social fronts? The picture that emerges—from casual empiricism as much as from careful analysis of facts and figures, from internal as much as from external critics, from dispassionate appraisal as much as from involved evaluation—is an unhappy one. One can ignore the message, or reject it, or shoot the messenger—or act constructively on it. In this chapter, it is contended that the Indian state’s public policy response to criticism of its public policy failures in recent times seems to have described everything from neglect to denial to aggressive rejection, without touching on any effort at introspection or self-improvement, even as the denial-cum-accusatory reaction to informed criticism has seriously undermined the institutions of constructive dialogue and deliberative democracy.
