NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, May 9, 2019

By Bhaskar Chakravorti and Ravi Shankar Chaturvedi

India is in the midst of a closely-watched election. The incumbent, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is seeking a second term and there are 900 million people eligible to vote, making this — potentially — the largest exercise in democracy anywhere in the world.

Both voters and policymakers in India face a crush of information as they consider their choices in the election and the priorities that lie beyond; there are numerous report cards on the Modi administration circulating on both mainstream and social media, including those prepared by the administration itself. Unfortunately, they also face a crush of misinformation and confusion on social media.  In our view, another critical missing element — especially for a country like India with big, global aspirations — is an objective evaluation of the government’s performance in policy areas such as citizen welfare, economic growth, and functioning public institutions.

To address this gap, we developed a performance evaluation framework with three attributes: data-driven measures of progress across a broad spectrum of policy goals; progress against a comparable peer group of emerging markets; and, given the Indian government’s emphasis on technology as a policy driver, benchmarks against global technology standards set by the world’s most digitally advanced governments.

Photo courtesy of Satish Krishnamurthy.