Distinctively Dysfunctional: ‘State Capitalism 2.0’ and the Indian Power Sector
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Editors
D'Costa, AP
Chakraborty, A
Edition
1
Pagination
155 - 174
Publisher
Publisher URL
ISBN-10
9811368910
ISBN-13
9789811368912
DOI
10.1007/978-981-13-6891-2
Journal
Changing Contexts and Shifting Roles of the Indian State: New Perspectives on Development Dynamics
Dynamics of Asian Development
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Show full item recordAbstract
State intervention in India has persisted but has proved far from immune to critiques of traditional dirigisme. An examination of the power sector shows that waves of reforms since 1991 have together created a hybrid and regionally differentiated state-market system. Blurring the public-private boundary, this reinvented “state capitalism 2.0” displays both refurbished modes of intervention and new governance arrangements with private players. Nonetheless, as the power sector’s continually dismal condition suggests, this state-capitalist hybrid has not (yet) provided a coherent alternative to older dirigisme or the Anglo-American mode of “deregulatory” liberalization. Instead, between 1991 and 2014 its ad hoc, layered emergence generated distinctive forms of dysfunction. Coupled with competitive politics, its ever-increasing institutional complexity rendered it internally incoherent and vulnerable to rent seeking on multiple fronts. Power sector evidence suggests that state intervention in India has remained simultaneously indispensable and dogged by persistent administrative and financial difficulties. Examining its internal institutional transformations helps to explain the apparently contradictory nature of the contemporary Indian state: at once business-friendly, populist, and often underperforming.