India’s story since 1947 is one of the great paradoxes of the modern world.
By Satish Jha
A nation of extraordinary civilizational depth, democratic vitality, and human potential has repeatedly fallen short of its promise. It incubates world-class scientists and CEOs, yet struggles to ensure basic literacy for millions; sends spacecraft to the moon while children in government schools memorize answers they do not understand; celebrates democratic freedoms even as bureaucratic inertia and political temptations blunt their transformative power.
For nearly eight decades, India has moved forward—sometimes boldly, sometimes haltingly—but rarely in a way that unlocks the full capabilities of its people.
Why has this happened? Why has a country with vast human capital and strategic advantage consistently left so much potential unrealized?
The usual explanations—extractive institutions, neoliberal excess, insufficient redistribution—each illuminate part of the picture, but none capture the deeper failure. The more fundamental truth is this: India has never placed human flourishing at the center of its development project.
It has built industries before minds, bureaucracies before capabilities, and growth before learning. The result is a nation that has progressed, but not evolved; expanded, but not flourished.
This argument stands on the intellectual foundations laid by Amartya Sen, Abhijit Banerjee, and Jeffrey Sachs—while also moving beyond them. Sen redefined development as freedom: the expansion of capabilities that allow individuals to lead lives they value. Banerjee revealed how small, local failures in classrooms, clinics, and governance accumulate into large national stagnation. Sachs demonstrated that long-term investments in health, education, and sustainability offer the only reliable escape from poverty traps.
Yet even these giants leave crucial gaps. Sen’s framework is ethically profound but often abstract. Banerjee’s is empirically precise but necessarily narrow. Sachs’s is visionary but at times technocratic. What India now requires is a synthesis that integrates their insights while adding the missing dimensions of ethical resilience, cultural evolution, and learning-centric education. That synthesis is the flourishing-first framework.
To understand its necessity, one must revisit the dominant narratives shaping India’s development discourse.
Institutional economists argue that prosperity flows from inclusive institutions—those that distribute power broadly, protect rights, and incentivize innovation. This explains much of India’s colonial inheritance: a bureaucracy designed for control, a political economy vulnerable to elite capture, and regulatory systems that long suppressed entrepreneurship.
Yet institutional design alone cannot explain why India’s formally democratic structures have so often failed in practice. Institutions do not operate in a vacuum. They are animated—or hollowed out—by the capabilities, ethics, and agency of the people who inhabit them. Constitutions can guarantee rights; only capable citizens can defend them.
Heterodox critics emphasize inequality, agrarian distress, and neoliberal excess. They rightly highlight how growth has often bypassed the vulnerable. But their primary remedy—greater state intervention—overlooks a hard reality: India’s administrative machinery has frequently been part of the problem. Redistribution without capability-building risks entrenching dependency rather than empowering agency.
Market advocates offer a third narrative: that liberalization unleashed India’s entrepreneurial energies. This, too, contains truth. Millions were lifted out of poverty. But markets require capable participants. Where education is shallow, health systems fragile, and ethical norms weak, markets amplify inequality rather than opportunity. Jobless growth and crony capitalism are not merely market failures; they are capability failures.
This is where flourishing-first becomes indispensable.
India’s central developmental failure is not industrial, institutional, or ideological—it is human. Education has been treated as certification rather than learning; health as welfare rather than capability; democracy as procedure rather than agency. India has built schools but not learning, elections but not civic reasoning, bureaucracies but not accountability, and growth but not flourishing.
Nowhere is this clearer than in education. India produces millions of graduates annually, yet employers lament the absence of critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving. This is not a failure of students, but of a system that rewards memorization over understanding and compliance over curiosity.
A flourishing-first model would transform education from the ground up: inquiry-based pedagogy, ethical reasoning embedded in curricula, and teachers recognized as nation-builders rather than exam supervisors. Learning would be understood not as preparation for life, but as life itself.
Health, too, must be reframed. No society can flourish when malnutrition persists amid growth and preventable diseases sap human potential. Sachs is right that health investment is foundational, but India’s deeper challenge lies in governance. A flourishing-first approach would decentralize health delivery, empower local communities, and embed accountability so that resources reach their intended beneficiaries.
Democracy must similarly evolve. Formal freedoms mean little when citizens lack the capacity to exercise them meaningfully. A flourishing-first society would nurture civic reasoning, ethical discourse, and decentralized accountability, accepting that institutional checks may slow decisions but ultimately strengthen trust, fairness, and long-term wellbeing.
Flourishing-first does not reject the insights of Sen, Banerjee, or Sachs—it completes them. It grounds Sen’s humanism in cultural transformation, scales Banerjee’s empirical insights through institutional redesign, and anchors Sachs’s long-term vision in everyday learning and agency. Development becomes not a race for GDP but a journey toward expanded human possibility.
India’s unfinished symphony can still be completed.
The nation stands at a moment of profound choice. It can continue pursuing growth without capability, reform without ethics, and democracy without agency. Or it can embrace a developmental ethos that places human flourishing at the center of national purpose.
This would require radical investment in transformative education, resilient health systems, decentralized governance, and a culture that values learning, integrity, and long-term thinking. It would require resisting short-term populism, bureaucratic expansion, and elite capture. Above all, it would require seeing people not as beneficiaries of development, but as its authors.
If India chooses this path, it can unlock the trillions in potential long left on the table. It can build institutions that are not merely inclusive in form but effective in practice. It can create a society that is not only prosperous, but fulfilled.
It can finish the symphony it began in 1947—not by adding more instruments, but by tuning the ones that matter most: the minds, hearts, and capabilities of its people.
About Satish Jha
Satish Jha is a social entrepreneur who earlier co-founded Jansatta for the Indian Express Group, was the chief Editor of newsweekly Dinamaan of The Times of India Group, a global CXO with a couple of Fortune 100 firms, founded edtech firm Edufront, chairs a family foundation Ashraya and supports about 27000 K12 students with One Tablet per Child programs.
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