An Alternative Development Agenda for India

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.

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.