Keen On

Few people are better equipped to unravel the riddle of the Indian economy than the former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan. As the co-author (with Rohit Lamba) of the just published Breaking the Mold: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity, Rajan lays out a strategy for Indian economic development that might allow the country to both maintain its much storied democracy and provide jobs and prosperity for its almost 1.5 billion people. While Rajan didn’t use the term “third way” in our conversation, there is a sense that he’s trying to navigate India between the Scylla of conventional western free market neo-liberalism and the Charybdis of the protectionism pursued by populists like Trump, Erdogen and perhaps the current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Certainly no great fan of Modi’s bureaucratic centralization, Rajan’s path to prosperity lies in decentralizing economic power to its federal states. It’s in the enlightened economic policies of states like Kerala, Rajan argues, that