Making India Work

For a nation that has one of the highest growth rates in the world, India is plagued by poverty and corruption. Sixty years after Independence, India accounts for around 36 per cent of the world’s poor. The deepening fault lines between the haves and the have-nots have given rise to skewed development and widespread discontent.

William Nanda Bissell, managing director of the successful Fabindia chain, believes India’s poverty is a direct result of its poor management by ruling elites who have mastered the art of winning elections but have no interest in the deeper issues of governance. He argues that economic development that consumes large amounts of natural resources and generates enormous pollution is not a luxury available to countries that are beginning their development now.

Instead, he proposes a radical new paradigm for development that delinks consumption from quality of life while strengthening the natural environment in the process. The central themes of Making India Work echo the ideas and beliefs that underpin the Constitution of India; but they venture beyond the hackneyed phrases of development to focus on strategies which can, Bissell believes, end poverty in India in five years.

Hard-hitting and provocative, this book is a result of Bissell’s journeys across rural and urban India, offering unique solutions to the challenges confronting its people.

‘‘ ‘William Bissell presents a practical roadmap to secure inclusive growth through inclusive cooperate governance. It is as useful an antidote to those so mesmerized by the higher trajectory of market-driven growth as to neglect its deleterious social, political and ethical consequences, as to those who yearn for a return to our socialist past’’
Mani Shankar Aiyar, former minister for Panchayati Raj

‘‘This book by William Bissell is a must read. It provokes us to think of the imaginative, the inventive and literally the impossible. Bissell combines idealism with practice. He brings us real ideas from a real laboratory of development . . .He brings us the belief that we can challenge the ideas of the past . . . [that] we can practise our beliefs and stand behind the change we believe in’’
Sunita Narain, director, Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi

‘‘Bissell’s book looks at the macrocosm of re-organizing and indeed providing an alternate set of values for India, a worthy tome that goes where more profound authors have never dared to go’’
Dilip Cherian, Mid Day

‘‘Making India Work [is] a book that functions on the premise that India isn’t poor, just poorly managed, and follows up with a series of ideas for change’’
Divya Kumar, The Hindu

‘‘[A] practical roadmap for a more inclusive India, littered with anecdotal evidence and scathing observations about our corporate and political elite, [it] makes a great read’’
Asian Age

‘‘We now have what can be called the Fabindia School of Economic Thought in the form of Making India Work . . . This could well be called Fabindia 2.0’’
Dilip Bob, India Today