This book provides a revamped, transformative, and fiscally sustainable developmental agenda for India to radically improve the well-being and livelihoods of its citizens. Grounded in a ‘people first’ approach, this alternative agenda focuses on seven vital development and inter-connected areas, including health, education, food and nutrition, child development, gender, livelihood and jobs, and urbanization. The volume highlights the systemic issues plaguing these sectors and offers pragmatic and implementable solutions to address them. The author takes cognizance of the COVID-19 pandemic and draws attention to the limitations of the current public policies and suggests cost-effective interventions and strategies that focus on the poor. The volume discusses crucial themes of universalizing healthcare, battling malnutrition and food insecurity, ensuring quality schooling, unshackling gendered mindsets, enhancing livelihoods and improving the urban quality of life to spell out a pragmatic and workable development agenda for India.
Accessible and reader-friendly, the book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of development studies, economics, public policy, governance, development policy, public administration, political studies, South Asia studies. It will also be of interest to professionals in the development sector.
1. The ‘People First’ Imperative
2. Universalizing Healthcare
3. Battling Malnutrition and Food Insecurity
4. Ensuring Quality Schooling
5. Caring for the Young Child
6. Improving Livelihoods, Creating Jobs
7. Unshackling Gendered Mindsets
8. Promoting Planned Urbanization
9. The Way Forward: Principles, Actions and Sustainability
Biography
Sanjay Kaul is a development policy analyst, a former IAS officer (1979-2007), and corporate leader (2008-21). He has over four decades of rich professional experience in both the government and the private sectors. During his long tenure as a civil servant, Kaul worked in leadership positions across sectors – development, health, nutrition, education, child development, food and agriculture, and industry, including in the Prime Minister’s office. He also had a successful long tenure in the private sector as head of a leading agri-business company. His current interests include human development concerns. He was recently appointed Chairman of the Government of India Task Force on Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) and is an advisor on ECCE to the Government of Karnataka as well. He serves as a member of the Managing Committee of five schools managed by the Delhi Public School Society. He is also presently an Independent Director of SEWA GRIH RIN Ltd. (SGRL), an affordable housing finance company.
"This book is unique because an economist who has worked in both the public and private sectors has addressed the Gandhian question of how to ‘keep the poor at the centre’. The book, written in a reader-friendly style, shows us how the poor and most vulnerable face the brunt of failures due to too many hurriedly designed Government schemes, poor service quality of everything from toilets to schools, and a rigid bureaucratic mindset that tends to exclude the reality of the over-worked and underpaid poor families. The real strength of the book however is the recommendations in each chapter which show us that there is a practical and common-sense way to improve what already exists and to ensure that necessary services reach those who need them. And importantly, the author answers the nay-sayers by demonstrating how a people-centred approach is financially feasible."
Renana Jhabvala, Padma Shri, Well known social worker, Chairperson Sewa Bharat.
"Sanjay Kaul has seen the challenges of development in all its complexity at ground level. He has come up with a thoughtful and innovative agenda for meeting them which he articulates and makes immediate through the lives of a typical impoverished family. His wisdom is really worth imbibing."
Arvind Subramanian, Senior Fellow, Brown University, and former Chief Economic Adviser, Government of India
"Sanjay Kaul’s book is scholarly yet eminently readable, brutally honest but always optimistic, an indictment, and a clarion call for change. The book is a tour de force that deserves to be read carefully by elected leaders, policy makers, and concerned citizens."
Ashok Alexander, Founder-Director, Antara Foundation, and former India Country Director, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
