The School That Has Everything Except Learning — Why India cannot copy its way to Viksit Bharat, and the old Indian test for borrowing well
Blossomed, Not Assembled · Volume I of VI · Parts One to Six
India cannot copy its way to Viksit Bharat. A copied school or regulator arrives without what made it work. An old Indian rule of debate gives a sharper test for borrowing, and India's own history shows the test both passed and failed.
In Brief: The first of six essays on what India's older texts and institutions can still do for a developed India. It explains why copied institutions so often fail here, using a rural school that has everything except learning. It follows one borrowing that worked, the Mexican wheat of the 1960s, including whom it missed and where it later failed. It turns a rule from the Indian tradition of debate into five questions for anything India is told to copy. For readers who want more from 2047 than a number.
A country is developed not when it owns the institutions of developed countries, but when it can make its own institutions work, and when that capability outlives the people who built it. This series of six essays asks what India's older texts and institutions can add to that kind of development. This first essay asks whether India can get there by copying. It finds that a copied form arrives without the conditions that made it work, and it shows this in a rural school and in the Mexican wheat of the 1960s. It takes a rule from the Indian tradition of debate, that you must state the other side fully before you answer it, and turns it into five questions for anything India is told to copy. It leaves open a harder question: why India should trust its own inheritance any more than the world's.
Opening — A school that has everything except learning
Take an imagined girl, Meena, in Class 5 at a government school in a rural district. Her school meets every rule for a school. It has a building, a register with her name in it, two teachers on the payroll, a midday meal, textbooks that arrived on time and an inspection report on file. Meena comes most days. She knows her letters. Put a short story in front of her, written for children in Class 2, and she reads the first line slowly, sound by sound, then stops.
Meena and her school are an imagined composite, not something any survey describes. The numbers around her are real. Every year or two since 2005, the Annual Status of Education Report, a household survey of rural India run by the ASER Centre with Pratham, has asked children to read exactly such a text.
In 2018, 50.5 per cent of rural children in Class 5 could read it. In 2022, after the school closures of the pandemic, it was 42.8 per cent. In 2024 it recovered to 48.8 per cent, and in government schools alone it was 44.8 per cent.¹ In every round from 2014 to 2024, the national share stayed between about 43 and 51 per cent.¹
The survey tests children at home, not in school, so it catches children the school register might hide. The national average also hides states where the school does teach and states where it largely does not. Still, an average near one half, held for a decade, is not an accident of a few bad districts. About half of the children in Standard V in rural India cannot read a text written for Standard II.
Nothing in Meena's school is fake. Every part is real. What is missing is the one thing all the parts exist to produce. India has spent seventy-five years building schools, regulators, commissions and ministries, many of them modelled on those of richer countries. That is the question this essay asks: can a country become developed by copying the institutions of countries that already are?
Part One — "Viksit" means a flower opening, not a building put up
On 15 August 2047, the Republic of India will be a hundred years old. The Union government has set that date as the deadline for becoming viksit, developed. The official vision is broader than a number. It speaks of an India that is "inclusive, progressive, empowered, thriving and sustainable".² Still, when the phrase Viksit Bharat appears on hoardings and in budget speeches, what is usually meant is a line that can be checked: an income per head above the World Bank's line for a high-income country, a size of economy, a share of manufacturing.
A number is a fair way to know whether a country has arrived. It is a poor guide to how to travel. Some oil states have incomes per head above most of Europe, and their wealth sits in the ground rather than in their institutions. Other economies grew fast for a generation and then stalled for decades just below the line. A threshold cannot tell you whether whatever produced it will go on producing it after the people who built it have retired.
A family that wins a lottery and a family that builds a business may have the same bank balance in the same year. Only one of them knows how to earn it again.
What the word says
Viksit is the Hindi form of the Sanskrit vikasita, from the root kas with the prefix vi-, "to open, expand, blossom".³ Monier-Williams's Sanskrit dictionary gives vikasita as "opened, open, expanded, budded, blown".³ In Sanskrit poetry it is the ordinary word for a flower that has opened, above all the lotus at sunrise.
A nation should not build its strategy on a dictionary entry. The word matters only because it carries a picture, and the picture makes a claim worth testing. A lotus that opens has not had petals attached to it. What appears when it opens was folded in the bud. It needs water and sunlight it did not make, and it takes both in. The shape it opens into is still its own.
Put as a claim about a nation, the picture says this. India will become developed by opening out what it already has, fed by whatever it can take in from outside. It will not get there by having another country's shape fixed onto it. On this reading, the opposite of viksit is not "poor". It is assembled, a country put together from parts made elsewhere.
A hypothesis, not a conclusion
I am reading the word harder than the hoarding does, and I say so plainly. The picture is a hypothesis, and this series treats it as one. This essay argues that the picture is right about one thing: copying fails. It does not settle whether the picture is right about everything. Lotuses in India mostly grow in tanks that people dug, not in rivers. A later essay in this series, on a Tamil village that wrote its own election rules, meets evidence strong enough to change the picture.
How these essays read old texts
A word on method, since the rest depends on it. These essays keep four kinds of claim apart. A textual claim says what a text says, with its verse number. An institutional claim says what people actually built or did, such as an inscription, a law or a contract. It is stronger evidence than a text, and rarer. A comparison between an ancient practice and a modern one is marked as a comparison, with a word on where the likeness ends.
An inference is what I think these texts imply for India in 2047, and it is marked as mine. A good verse is evidence of an idea. It is not evidence that a society lived by it.
"The tradition", in these essays, means a selection, chosen by me: the Vedic hymns, the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavad Gītā, Kauṭilya's Arthaśāstra, the Nyāya texts on logic and debate, Sanskrit astronomy, the Tamil Tirukkuṟaḷ, Aśoka's edicts and some inscriptions. Much of it is Brahmanical, not all. Buddhist, Jain, Sikh and Islamic institutions, such as the monastic saṅgha, the langar kitchen and the waqf endowment, have their own answers to the question of what lasts. They are not treated at length, and nothing here implies they have less to offer.
These essays are not a scheme-by-scheme policy paper. They do not claim that ancient India was developed. By any measure a modern economist would use, it was not.
Part Two — Why does a school with everything still fail?
It fails because what makes an institution work does not travel with its form. Three development economists, Lant Pritchett, Michael Woolcock and Matt Andrews, gave this pattern a name in 2013: isomorphic mimicry.⁴ "Isomorphic" means "of the same shape". The term comes from biology, where a harmless snake survives by carrying the colours of a poisonous one. The economists used it for governments that adopt the outward forms of successful institutions, because those forms bring legitimacy and funding: the ministry, the regulator, the anti-corruption commission, the school system.⁴ The forms arrive. The capability they have elsewhere does not.
Mimicry is often not a mistake that someone forgot to correct. It can be a settled arrangement that suits the people inside it. A building, a payroll and a textbook order give visible credit, contracts and jobs within one term of office. Learning gives none of these in one term, and no one loses anything when it fails to appear.
The same paper names a second pattern, premature load bearing.⁴ An institution is asked to carry more than the capability beneath it can bear. It breaks, or, more often, it pretends. Picture a block education office with one inspector for two hundred schools. It is being asked to bear a load it cannot. It files reports instead.
How the syllabus leaves a child behind
Inside Meena's classroom, the copied form that does most harm is probably not the building. It is the class graded by age, with a fixed syllabus the teacher must finish each year. When a child falls behind in Class 2, the syllabus marches on without her for three more years.
Pratham's Teaching at the Right Level does the opposite. It tests children with a simple tool, groups them by what they can actually do rather than by age or class, and teaches each group from there. Randomised evaluations by Abhijit Banerjee, Rukmini Banerji, Esther Duflo and colleagues found that some versions of it raised learning inside government schools.⁵ I read it as starting from the child's actual conditions, not from a borrowed timetable. That is the sense of "one's own path" this essay defends below.
What does not travel with a copied regulator
"Capability" is easy to say and hard to see. So here is what stays behind when a form is copied. Take a regulator modelled on one in a richer country. In the country it came from, it works because of things that are not written into its founding act:
a career path in which an officer who bends a rule for a friend is finished, and everyone in the service knows it
courts that decide a challenge to the regulator's order while the firm in question still exists
a press that can name the officer, and a professional body that can strip a licence
a treasury that does not quietly refill the budget of an office that has failed
engineers, accountants and lawyers in enough numbers to staff it, paid enough to prefer it to capture.
Copy the act and you get the regulator. You do not get the career path, the courts, the press, the treasury or the engineers. The form is imported and it arrives. The conditions that made it work stay at home.
Some things copy perfectly well
The claim is about forms that need capability, not about everything that can be borrowed. A standard, a notation or a unit of measure copies well. India passed the Standards of Weights and Measures Act in 1956 to set standards "based on the metric system", and metric measures began to take legal effect in 1958.⁶ The decimal rupee, a hundred naye paise to the rupee, came into force on 1 April 1957.⁷ Both took hold within a few years. A kilogram needs no one's judgment to be a kilogram.
The trouble starts with forms that are meant to make people do something, and to notice when they have not. A regulator, a school or a court is that kind of form. It works only if someone inside it can be told "no", and hears it.
A capable head, and arms and legs that do not follow
In 2009, Pritchett described India as a "flailing state". Its head, the elite institutions at the national level, remains "sound and functional", he wrote, but "is no longer reliably connected via nerves and sinews to its own limbs".⁸ That picture explains more about copied institutions in India than any other single fact. A ministry in Delhi can adopt a form in a week. Whether it produces a result depends on a block office in another state, under another government, staffed by people hired under other rules.
India is a federal republic, and much of its capability sits in the states, unevenly. The same national scheme can succeed in one state and fail in the state next door, run on the same guidelines. Many models India is urged to copy come from unitary states or city-states, where the head and the hands answer to one authority. They assume a connection between the two that India does not have.
A petal glued to a stem is a petal. It is not a flower.
The strongest objection to this whole series
Here is the objection Pritchett and his co-authors would make, and it is serious. They would say that capability is not inherited from any civilisation. It is built. In their book Building State Capability (2017), they describe how.⁹ Find a specific problem people care about. Try something. Watch closely what happens. Change it. Try again. They call this problem-driven iterative adaptation, or PDIA.⁹ On their account, a country's ancient texts are as irrelevant to state capability as its cuisine. What matters is whether its officials are allowed to fail, learn and adjust.
I think they are right about the method. Whether India's inheritance contains anything that supports that method is a separate question, and this essay does not settle it. Later essays in this series test it against inscriptions and laws, which are harder evidence than verses. One wall will not settle it either, and I will not pretend it does.
Part Three — The Mexican wheat that fed India, and the water it cost
The Green Revolution showed India how to borrow well, and then how to stop correcting. If this essay showed only failures, its advice would collapse into "borrow nothing", which would be wrong and would betray an inheritance that has always borrowed. So here is a borrowing that worked, told at the same level of detail as the school, including the part where it later went wrong.
The seed
In the early 1960s, India could not feed itself. It depended on shipments of American wheat, and droughts in 1965 and 1966 made the dependence dangerous. In Mexico, the American plant breeder Norman Borlaug had developed semi-dwarf wheat. A short stem let the plant carry a heavy head of grain without falling over. With enough water and fertiliser, it yielded far more than the tall traditional varieties.
In October 1963, about 100 kilograms of seed of four Mexican varieties arrived at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi. They were sown that November in trial fields at the Institute and at Ludhiana, Pantnagar, Kanpur and Pusa.¹⁰ In 1966, India bought about 18,200 tonnes of Mexican seed, of the varieties Sonora 64 and Lerma Rojo 64A. Indian farmers sowed it on some 240,000 hectares in the winter season of 1966–67.¹⁰
The seed was the borrowed form. What made it a graft and not a copy is what India did around it.
The package, not the seed
India's scientists and planners understood that the Mexican wheat was not magic seed. It was a package. It needed assured irrigation, heavy fertiliser, credit to buy both, and a price stable enough to make the investment worth a farmer's risk. Take away any one of these and the new seed yields little more than the old. Reading a model's reasons, and not only its conclusion, is the difference between a graft and a copy.
Then India supplied what it lacked and changed what did not fit. The Mexican wheats had red grain, which Indian farmers and eaters did not like. Indian scientists selected from the Mexican material and produced their own varieties, Kalyan Sona and Sonalika, with amber grain that made better chapatis.¹⁰ In 1965 the government set up the Agricultural Prices Commission and the Food Corporation of India.¹¹ ¹² Between them, they offered farmers a support price and bought the grain.
Even the universities that tested the seed and trained the extension workers were grafts. The first agricultural university, at Pantnagar, was dedicated to the nation by Jawaharlal Nehru on 17 November 1960. It was built on the American land-grant model, in partnership with the University of Illinois.¹³ Wells were sunk and villages electrified to run pumps.
The result
It worked, at scale, in Indian hands. On the eve of the new seed, in 1966–67, India produced about 11.4 million tonnes of wheat. By 1971–72 it produced about 26.4 million tonnes, more than double in five years.¹⁴ Within a decade, a country that had lived on shipments stopped needing them.
The farmer could see his field
One further reason the wheat worked has nothing to do with the planners' wisdom, and it matters more than any other for the rest of this series. A farmer who sows the new seed sees the result in one season. The yield is in his own field. He can weigh it, and his neighbour can see it over the bund. Adoption spread because the evidence was visible to the person taking the risk.
A parent cannot see, in any season, whether a child in Class 5 can read a Class 2 text. The school reports attendance, and attendance is visible. Learning is not, until a survey goes looking for it. An institution corrects itself only as fast as the people inside it can see what it produces. The wheat had that feedback built in by nature. The school would have to have it built in by design, and mostly does not.
The comparison has a limit, and a fair reader will press it. Wheat is a technology with a yield, a buyer and a price. A school is an organisation whose product is hard to inspect. So the wheat was the easier borrowing. That is part of the lesson, not an escape from it. A borrower has to ask, before borrowing, whether anyone will be able to see if it is working.
Whom it missed, and where it failed
A triumphal account leaves out whom the graft did not reach. The package needed assured water, so it went first to irrigated districts in the north-west. Rainfed farmers, most of eastern India, and the landless, who had no field to sow it in, gained far less. Some lost, as land values and machines moved bargaining power to those who already owned land.
Then there is the water itself. In Punjab and Haryana it came more and more from under the ground. The seed did not drain the aquifers on its own. Incentives laid on top of it did. Assured government purchase of paddy as well as wheat made a water-hungry rotation the safest bet a farmer could make. Free electricity for farm pumps made pumping almost costless.
Punjab began subsidising farm power in 1997 and later made it free for all farmers. A government imposed a charge on farm motors in 2002, and was forced by political pressure to restore free power in November 2005.¹⁵ In the Central Ground Water Board's 2024 assessment, Punjab drew about 157 per cent of its yearly extractable groundwater, the highest share of any state.¹⁶
The graft took root. The incentives around it were not corrected when the conditions changed. Later essays in this series return to the aquifer and to the free power.
The school and the wheat, side by side
Both were borrowed, so the difference is not their source. The difference is what the borrower did before accepting and after. With the wheat, India understood the reasons, supplied or adapted the conditions, and could see the result. Then it stopped correcting. With the school, India copied the form, did not supply the conditions, and measured enrolment instead of learning. It has been slow to correct ever since, partly because what it measured was never the thing that was failing.
Part Four — Is "follow your own path" Gītā wisdom, or caste in disguise?
It has been both, and which one it is depends on how the verse is read. Read as a rule of birth, it was caste. Read as a rule about where a country must start, it is a useful warning against copying.
If copying fails and borrowing needs judgment, a country needs something to judge from, an honest account of where it actually stands. The Bhagavad Gītā has the classic line for this. It has been misused so often that it has to be handled with care:
śreyān svadharmo viguṇaḥ paradharmāt svanuṣṭhitāt svadharme nidhanaṃ śreyaḥ paradharmo bhayāvahaḥ Better one's own dharma, though done imperfectly, than another's dharma done well. Better to die in one's own dharma. Another's dharma brings fear. Bhagavad Gītā 3.35¹⁷ (plain rendering mine)
Dharma here means one's proper course of action, the duty that belongs to one's position. Sva- means "one's own", and para- means "another's". The verse runs against every instinct of a catching-up economy. It says an imperfect version of your own course is better than a flawless performance of someone else's.
Isn't "svadharma" just caste by another name?
It has been, and that is the first of two cautions, neither optional. For many centuries the verse was read as a command to stay in the occupation and station of one's birth. A potter's son was a potter, and to want to be a scholar was to want another's dharma. That reading did enormous damage. A doctrine that stops people from acquiring capability has failed the test of development, however old it is. Nothing in this series endorses it.
The Gītā itself gave that reading its anchor. Verse 18.47 repeats the first half of 3.35 word for word, then adds that a person who does the work fixed by their svabhāva, inborn nature, incurs no fault.¹⁸ It comes straight after verses that divide work among the four varṇas, the classes of the old social order, by qualities that arise from nature.¹⁸ A republic must cut that link. Its citizens' work cannot be fixed by birth or by a nature someone assigns them, so this series uses svadharma only to mean starting conditions.
The tradition's own texts contain other grounds for discarding the birth-reading, and the next essay in this series takes them up. The less comfortable fact is that the discarding did not come from those texts alone. Much of it came from outside the orthodox schools: from bhakti poets, from Buddhist and anti-caste thinkers, from reform movements and from law.
The second caution is about my own use of the verse. The Gītā speaks to one person, Arjuna, on a battlefield. It says nothing about nations. Applying svadharma, one's own dharma, to a country is my inference, and it carries a specific danger. A nation has no single nature. It has a population with distributions, conflicts and majorities that change. Say "India is" a family-centred society, and a statistic has become a destiny. Whoever does not fit becomes a deviation. That is the old birth-reading of the verse, coming back through the side door.
Starting conditions, not essence
I therefore use the verse in one sense only. For a country, svadharma cannot mean "what we are". It can mean the actual conditions from which we must begin. Inheritance, in this series, is a starting condition, not an essence. Some of what India has inherited is an asset. Some is a liability, some is out of date, and some can be changed. Development means knowing which is which. It does not mean keeping all of it, and it does not mean pretending one began somewhere else.
Here are some of those conditions, as facts about the present:
households that save a large share of their income, in gold, land and deposits, and that have long been one of the main sources of the country's investment
older people who mostly live with their children, about 68 per cent of Indians over sixty in the national Longitudinal Ageing Study of 2017–18¹⁹
dense clusters of small firms bound by kinship and trust, making knitwear, brassware, diamonds, pumps, fireworks and generic medicines for the world, often with little help from the state
a federal democracy of great linguistic and religious variety, with an old suspicion of concentrated power, and a head and hands that do not always connect.
Who the conditions leave out
These conditions describe people who already have something: a house, some savings, a family trade. They leave out others:
the landless labourer
the migrant who moves for seasonal work, whose only capital is a body and a phone
the woman who has left the joint household, or who wants a wage and not only a role in care.
Those people are not deviations from India's path. Each has a path of their own. A republic's svadharma is many such paths under one public rule, not a single national course. A strategy built only on the list above would be a strategy for those already provided for. Some of the list is shrinking, too. The joint household is thinning in every city. An economy of the size planned for 2047 will need large firms, which clusters of small ones cannot become.
What the verse asks, read this way, is that a development strategy start from these conditions. It should strengthen what works in them and correct what harms. It should not treat them as backwardness to be replaced by an imported template. A borrowed model that ignores household savings, family care and the small-firm cluster will be fighting its own population. It will be, in the Gītā's words, paradharma svanuṣṭhita, another's path, well executed, going nowhere for the people on it.
A path is not legitimate because it is ours
There is a rule inside this that protects it from romance. A path is not legitimate because it is ours. It is legitimate only if it produces what we claim to be walking it for. "Our own way" is no defence of a school where children cannot read, of a family that confines, or of a cluster that stays small and informal forever.
Skill, built into an institution
The same chapters of the Gītā add two things without which "one's own path" becomes an excuse for mediocrity. The first is a standard:
yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam Yoga is skill in action. Bhagavad Gītā 2.50²⁰ (plain rendering mine)
Kauśala means dexterity, competence, craftsmanship. The line does not define yoga as right intention, or piety, or detachment alone. It says skill. India has long tolerated the merely adequate: the road relaid every monsoon, the file that moves only when pushed. For such a country this may be the most practical sentence in the book.
Individual skill is the easy half. The hard half is an institution that is skilled, and India has a recent example. In September 2019, the Chandrayaan-2 lander was lost in a hard landing on the Moon. For the next attempt, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation, S. Somanath, said in July 2023: "instead of a success-based design in Chandrayaan-2, we are doing a failure-based design in Chandrayaan-3."²¹
Engineers modelled what would happen if sensors, engines or calculations failed, and built the answers into the software. They widened the landing zone from 500 metres square to 4 kilometres by 2.5, and added fuel to divert if needed.²¹ ²² Chandrayaan-3 landed in August 2023.
One success does not make a rule, and ISRO is an unusual institution, small, technical and protected. The point is not national pride. It is that kauśala, at the scale of an institution, means treating your own failure as information rather than as an embarrassment to be managed. Most Indian institutions are designed to hide failure. That one was redesigned around it.
Many tops, and the job of holding the world together
The second thing the Gītā adds is a warning about where standards come from:
yad yad ācarati śreṣṭhas tat tad evetaro janaḥ sa yat pramāṇaṃ kurute lokas tad anuvartate Whatever the best person does, other people do. Whatever standard that person sets, the world follows. Bhagavad Gītā 3.21²³ (plain rendering mine)
Standards travel downwards. If the minister cuts a corner, the clerk will cut one. In the verse before, 3.20, Kṛṣṇa gives the reason even the wise must go on acting: lokasaṃgraha, holding the world together.²³
The verse assumes one visible top, and India has many. The minister, the founder, the film star, the cricketer, the godman and the senior officer all set standards at once, and the standards often cancel. The film star's display of wealth teaches the young one thing. The scientist's modesty teaches another. Standards travel sideways as well as down, and the loudest wins.
Read as a public principle, lokasaṃgraha means someone must still set a public standard strong enough to overrule the private ones. That job belongs first to the people who hold public office. The reason is not piety. The world comes apart when those who make the rules treat them as suggestions.
The Gītā's point is that people at the top of an institution cannot opt out of setting an example. Everything they do teaches. That is also why development cannot rest on example alone. If a result depends on exceptional people behaving exceptionally, the capability has not yet been built into the institution.
Part Five — How India borrowed from the Greeks and the British without becoming a copy
"Begin from your own conditions" can turn very quickly into "borrow nothing". Isn't borrowing what every successful country did? It is, and India's own oldest text asks for it. A hymn in the first book of the Ṛgveda begins:
ā no bhadrāḥ kratavo yantu viśvataḥ Let good thoughts come to us from every side. Ṛgveda 1.89.1²⁴
The familiar English line is a loose modern rendering. Kratu means intelligent will, resolve, a wise purpose, and Ralph Griffith in 1896 rendered the phrase "powers auspicious".²⁴ Either way, the prayer asks for good things from viśvataḥ, every direction. The question is not whether to borrow. It is how to tell a borrowing that will take root from one that will produce a school with no learning.
Three kinds of argument
The Nyāya tradition of Indian logic offers a test that the development literature, for all its evidence on failed copies, does not state as sharply. The Nyāya Sūtra, the founding text of that tradition, distinguishes three kinds of debate in its first book (1.2.1–3).²⁵
Vāda is discussion aimed at finding the truth, in which each side is willing to be shown wrong. Jalpa is argument aimed at winning, by tricks if they work. Vitaṇḍā is destructive wrangling, attacking the other side while defending no position of one's own.²⁵ The tradition honoured the first and treated the other two as degraded forms.
State the other side first
Alongside vāda, a convention of philosophical writing and debate held for more than a thousand years, across schools that agreed on little else. No single sūtra states it as a rule. It is visible in how the commentaries are built, and calling it a rule is my synthesis of that practice. Before you may argue against a view, you first state it fully and fairly, as its own holders would. That statement is the pūrvapakṣa, "the prior side". Only after it may you give your siddhānta, "the established conclusion".
The great Vedānta teacher Śaṅkara, in his commentary on the Brahma Sūtra, sets out the positions of Sāṃkhya, Vaiśeṣika, Buddhist and Jain thinkers at length before answering them.²⁶ The convention makes it hard to win by defeating a caricature.
Isn't this just "listen to both sides"? No, and the difference is the point. Listening is passive, and anyone can claim to have done it. The pūrvapakṣa is a written performance that can be checked. You must state the other view well enough that its holders would accept your statement, and only then do you earn the right to reply. It is a gate, not a courtesy.
Imitation is a conclusion without the prior side
Now apply this to borrowing. The Nyāya authors were thinking about philosophy, not ministries, so this is my inference. Imitation is adopting someone else's siddhānta without having stated their pūrvapakṣa. You take their conclusion, their regulator, their curriculum or their procurement rule, without being able to say why they reached it. You do not know what problem it solved for them, what conditions it assumed, or what they tried first and dropped.
A graft is a borrowing whose reasons the borrower can state, argue with and test against local conditions before accepting. The Mexican wheat was a graft in this sense. Meena's school was not.
The hidden condition
Nyāya logic also has a precise name for what stays behind when a form is copied. An upādhi is a hidden condition, one that always goes with the result but not always with the supposed cause. The logicians' textbook case is the claim that wherever there is fire there is smoke. It fails, they said, because smoke needs wet fuel, and a red-hot iron ball has fire and no smoke.²⁷ "Wherever there is an independent regulator, there is discipline" is a rule of the same kind. Its wet fuel is the career path, the courts and the press that a copied regulator leaves at home.
Before borrowing, and after
The pūrvapakṣa does its work before a borrowing. It cannot tell you afterwards whether the graft took. For that the same tradition has a second test. Vātsyāyana's commentary on the Nyāya Sūtra opens by saying that a means of knowledge is shown to be sound by pravṛtti-sāmarthya, the success of the action it prompts.²⁸ You know your knowledge was good when acting on it brings what you expected.
The farmer's harvest had that test built in. The school register hides it, because it records the attempt, a child enrolled and a meal served, and not whether the child learned to read. An institution needs both: somewhere the strongest objection is heard before it acts, such as a dissent recorded or an audit that can find against the department, and a way to see whether the action worked, such as a survey like ASER. Much of what this series calls capability turns out to be those two channels.
Can copying be how capability begins?
Sometimes it is, and this is the strongest objection to everything above. An imported form can grow the conditions it lacked. A new regulator can train the profession it needs, and a borrowed constitution can grow conventions its text never stated. What separates those cases from Meena's school is not where the form came from. The borrower kept measuring whether it worked, and kept adjusting. Teaching at the Right Level reached government schools this way: some versions failed, were measured as failing and were changed.⁵
India has done this before, slowly, with evidence to show for it.
Greek astronomy in Sanskrit
In the early centuries CE, Greek astrology and astronomy reached India. The Yavanajātaka, "the horoscopy of the Greeks", rendered a Greek text into Sanskrit. David Pingree dated it to the second and third centuries CE. Later scholars, most recently Bill Mak working from a newly found manuscript, have found serious problems with Pingree's reading, so its dates are disputed.²⁹ The loanwords are not in doubt. Horā, the hour, comes from Greek hōra, kendra from kentron, and liptā, a minute of arc, from leptē.³⁰ The borrowers did not pretend the learning was theirs.
The astronomer Varāhamihira, in the sixth century, wrote a verse about it in his Bṛhatsaṃhitā:
mlecchā hi yavanās teṣu samyak śāstram idaṃ sthitam ṛṣivat te 'pi pūjyante kiṃ punar daivavid dvijaḥ The Greeks are foreigners, yet this science is well established among them. Even they are honoured like seers. How much more, then, a twice-born who knows it. Bṛhatsaṃhitā 2.14 (2.15 in some editions)³¹ (plain rendering mine)
The first line is a pūrvapakṣa stated with respect. The second line keeps a gate. It ranks a "twice-born", a man of the upper castes, above the foreign knower, and within India the same knowledge was not open to everyone. Openness to the outsider's idea and closure to the insider of the wrong birth sit in one verse. A later essay in this series, on who may drink from a public tank, takes up the second half of that sentence.
The bowstring that became a sine
What followed was not a copy. Greek astronomers calculated with the full chord of a circle, and Indian astronomers by Āryabhaṭa's time, around 500 CE, used the half-chord, jyā, "the bowstring", which is our sine. Arabic scholars wrote the word as jība, which later became jayb, "a fold", and Latin translators rendered that as sinus.³²
Why is Ambedkar in an essay on ancient wisdom?
Because the Republic's founding document is India's largest act of borrowing, and the man who moved it in the Constituent Assembly stated its pūrvapakṣa in public. On 4 November 1948, B. R. Ambedkar answered the charge that the draft Constitution was a copy. He first stated the charge in full: "that about half of it has been copied from the Government of India Act of 1935 and that the rest of it has been borrowed from the Constitutions of other countries. Very little of it can claim originality."³³ ³⁴ Then he answered it:
"The only new things, if there can be any, in a Constitution framed so late in the day are the variations made to remove the faults and to accommodate it to the needs of the country. The charge of producing a blind copy of the Constitutions of other countries is based, I am sure, on an inadequate study of the Constitution."³³
On the colonial statute of 1935, he conceded the point and refused the shame:
"I make no apologies. There is nothing to be ashamed of in borrowing. It involves no plagiarism. Nobody holds any patent rights in the fundamental ideas of a Constitution."³³
What he regretted was narrower: that the provisions taken from the 1935 Act "relate mostly to the details of administration".³³ The question was never whether a model came from elsewhere. It was whether the borrower knew what each clause was for. Some of the variations were large. The Assembly chose a parliamentary executive over a presidential one. It abolished untouchability in the fundamental rights rather than leaving it to custom.
The second refusal, and the Assembly's reply
In the same speech, Ambedkar answered a second criticism, from members who wanted the Constitution built up from village and district panchayats. The romance of the self-governing Indian village had a colonial author. Charles Metcalfe, an official of the East India Company, had described the villages as "little republics having nearly everything that they want within themselves", surviving every dynasty unchanged. Ambedkar quoted Metcalfe, and then refused the praise:³³
"I hold that these village republics have been the ruination of India ... What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism? I am glad that the Draft Constitution has discarded the village and adopted the individual as its unit."³³
He was refusing survival as a virtue. A village that outlasted every dynasty had also outlasted every attempt to free the people at its bottom, people of his own birth among them.
The Assembly did not leave it there. On 22 November 1948, eighteen days later, K. Santhanam moved an amendment: "The State shall take steps to organise village panchayats and endow them with such powers and authority as may be necessary to enable them to function as units of self-government." Ambedkar replied, "Sir, I accept the amendment," and the motion was adopted.³⁵ It became Article 40, a directive principle, a duty the courts cannot enforce. The village was not discarded. It was demoted to an aim, and it stayed one until the constitutional amendments of 1992.
The Republic's founding act thus contains two refusals and one revision. It refused to copy blindly from abroad. It refused to rebuild itself on an idealised past. Then, within three weeks, it revised its own refusal, on the record, with the refuser's consent. A later essay in this series turns to a medieval village assembly that would not have admitted Ambedkar, and has to reckon with his sentence directly.
Part Six — Copy Korea? Copy the welfare state? Five questions to ask first
Neither model should be copied whole, and each has a part worth grafting. A test that is only stated is still an ornament, so here it is applied to two models India is regularly told to copy.
"As they do in East Asia"
South Korea and Taiwan industrialised within a generation by directing credit to chosen firms and industries. The siddhānta is industrial policy: pick sectors, subsidise firms, protect them until they can compete. The pūrvapakṣa, as the economist Alice Amsden set it out in Asia's Next Giant (1989), is more specific. In her account, the Korean state gave subsidies only in return for performance. It set strict standards for the firms it aided, above all export targets, and firms that failed lost support.³⁶
The reciprocity worked because of conditions that are rarely copied along with it:
land reform first, in South Korea in 1949–50 and in Taiwan from 1949 to 1953, which broke the landlords and spread rural income³⁷
a bureaucracy able to say no to politically connected firms
controls on capital
a long security emergency, under authoritarian governments, which disciplined everyone.
Reciprocity was not the whole story either. American aid paid for about 70 per cent of South Korea's imports from 1953 to 1961, membership of the world trading rules from 1967 opened markets to its exports, and the state kept unions weak and wages low.³⁸ ³⁹
India has already run this experiment once, without the decisive part. From the 1950s to 1991 it licensed industry, directed credit through nationalised banks, and protected chosen sectors behind tariffs. It copied the subsidy and the protection. It did not copy the discipline. A protected Indian firm that never exported lost nothing, and often gained, because its licence kept rivals out. That is the clearest Indian case of a siddhānta taken without its pūrvapakṣa.
Is PLI working?
The production-linked incentive schemes are India's second attempt. They pay firms incentives on their additional sales, over a base year, of goods made in India.⁴⁰ Three numbers must be kept apart. The announced outlay, across fourteen sectors, is about ₹1.97 lakh crore. The money actually paid out by 31 December 2025 was about ₹28,748 crore, roughly one rupee in seven. Separately, the ministry reported cumulative exports of over ₹8.3 lakh crore from those sectors.⁴¹ That is what the sectors exported, not what the subsidy caused. Mobile phones and electronics have done far better than most other sectors.⁴¹
Additional sales are not exports, so the schemes carry only part of the reciprocity. I think they are an incomplete graft that has not yet passed the last of the five questions below: whether the firms they paid can compete without them. The early record is uneven, and the answer cannot be known yet.
In my judgment, India should not want the authoritarian half of the East Asian package, and a democracy could not sustain it in any case. The reciprocity travels. The verdict is to graft the reciprocity, measure whether subsidised firms actually export, and withdraw support from those that do not. The last step is the one India skipped last time.
"As they do in a rich welfare state"
In many rich countries, the cost of old age sits largely on the public budget, paid by pensions and publicly funded care. The siddhānta is a universal state pension. It is often contrasted, in Indian speeches, with the Indian family that looks after its parents. That contrast needs its own pūrvapakṣa.
Even rich states find the load heavy. In June 2026, the trustees of the United States Social Security system reported that its retirement trust fund would run out in late 2032. After that, incoming taxes would still pay about 78 per cent of scheduled benefits. The combined retirement and disability funds would run out in 2034.⁴² That is a funding gap in a working system, not a collapse. Benefits would fall to the share that taxes can pay. They would not stop.
The pūrvapakṣa of the welfare state is about money and administration. Rich countries fund pensions from payroll taxes on formal jobs or from taxes on a broad base, and pay them through records that already exist. India is not that society. Nearly nine in ten Indian workers are informally employed.⁴³ That makes a pension harder to fund and harder to deliver. It does not disqualify informal workers from protection.
Should India then adopt a universal pension? Not a copied one. A blind copy would promise what the present tax base cannot carry, through a payroll system most workers are not on.
The family has its own pūrvapakṣa, and it would be dishonest to skip it. About 68 per cent of Indians over sixty live with a child.¹⁹ Living with a child is not the same as being well cared for. The care is unpaid, and women carry most of it. In the 2024 national time-use survey, women who gave unpaid care to household members spent about 137 minutes a day on it, against 75 for men.⁴⁴ The widow with no son, and the parent whose children have migrated, fall through the family net altogether.
The verdict is to graft the principle that no old person should fall below a floor, and to build the funding and delivery that an informal labour market needs for it. The question is how public institutions can protect the old while sharing the unpaid care that women now carry.
The five questions
Put to any proposal that arrives with the words "as they do in" attached, the test comes to five questions:
What problem was this designed to solve where it came from?
How does it actually produce its result there, as opposed to what it looks like?
What conditions does that depend on, and which of them does India have?
What must change because India's conditions differ, who will supply what is missing, and whom does it leave out, there and here?
How will we know whether it is working here, what would make us stop, and can we undo it if we are wrong?
If the people adopting a model cannot answer these in their own words, what is being proposed is a copy, and a copy produces a building without results. The question about knowing whether it works matters most, because it keeps a successful graft from becoming the next unexamined inheritance.
The wheat passed the first three questions. It half-passed the fourth, since it left the rainfed east and the landless behind. It failed the last. Its incentives proved very hard to undo, and Punjab's one serious attempt to charge farmers for power again, in 2002, lasted about three years.¹⁵ A borrowing that cannot be withdrawn deserves more caution before it is made.
Vāda inside the country
The same rule works inside a country, and India needs it there at least as much. Watch a television debate or read a political thread and count how much of it is vāda. Most of it is jalpa and vitaṇḍā, argument to win and attacks with no proposal attached. The cause is not bad manners. It is incentives. Airtime, party discipline and promotion pay for winning. None of them pays for stating the other side's case well.
A country whose public argument never states the other side's case cannot correct its own mistakes, because it never finds out which of its positions the other side had right. The remedy lies in design, not sermons.
A cabinet note could be required to record the strongest case against a decision before it is taken. A bill could carry a written statement of the best objection to it, prepared by those who will vote against it. Courts already require something like it, in the old rule that both sides must be heard.
Such a rule can itself be mimicked. A ministry can add a box headed "objections considered", fill it with boilerplate and carry on. It works only if the person writing the objection is protected and has a reason to make it hurt, and if someone bears a cost when a recorded objection is ignored and proves right.
Ending — The harder test is the one India must put to its own past
India has borrowed well before: Greek astronomy, Mexican wheat, a constitution built from many models. It borrowed well when it could state the reasons, supply the conditions, change what did not fit and see the result. It borrowed badly when it copied the form and then measured the form.
A harder question remains than the one this essay set out to answer. If India should not copy the world, why should it trust what it inherited? The inheritance contains the rule of the prior side, and Varāhamihira's courtesy to the Greeks. It also contains the reading of the Gītā that kept the potter's son a potter, the twice-born clause in the astronomer's verse, and the village that Ambedkar called a sink.
The only fair rule I can find is the one this essay used abroad. A part of the inheritance is kept only if it passes the same five questions asked of any foreign model: what it was for, how it works, what it depends on, whom it leaves out, and how we would know it had failed. The next essay puts the inheritance to that test. Its plainest form is a question about one child: does this help build a school where Meena learns to read?
Words to keep
dharma: one's proper course of action, the duty that belongs to one's position.
jalpa: argument aimed at winning by any means that work.
jyā: the bowstring. In Indian astronomy, the half-chord of a circle, the ancestor of the sine.
kauśala: skill, dexterity, craftsmanship. In the Gītā, the mark of yoga in action.
kratu: intelligent will, resolve, a wise purpose.
lokasaṃgraha: holding the world together. In the Gītā, the reason the wise must go on acting.
paradharma: another's dharma, a course of action that belongs to someone else.
pravṛtti-sāmarthya: the success of the action that knowledge prompts. In Nyāya, the sign that a means of knowledge was sound. In this essay, the test of whether a borrowing took.
pūrvapakṣa: "the prior side". The full and fair statement of a view one intends to answer, made before answering it.
siddhānta: "the established conclusion". The answer one gives after stating the prior side.
svabhāva: inborn nature.
svadharma: one's own dharma. In this series, the actual conditions from which a country must begin, not its essence.
upādhi: a hidden condition. In Nyāya logic, a condition that always goes with the result but not always with the supposed cause, as wet fuel goes with smoke but not always with fire.
vāda: discussion aimed at finding the truth, in which each side accepts that it may be shown wrong.
varṇa: one of the four classes of the old Brahmanical social order.
vikasita: opened, expanded, blown, as a flower. The Sanskrit source of the Hindi viksit, developed.
vitaṇḍā: destructive wrangling, attacking the other side while defending no position of one's own.
viśvataḥ: from every side.
Sources
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"Food Corporation of India" (set up 14 January 1965 under the Food Corporations Act, 1964). Secondary: the Corporation's own site could not be opened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_Corporation_of_India
G. B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology, Pantnagar, official website (founded 17 November 1960, dedicated to the nation by Jawaharlal Nehru, land-grant model, University of Illinois partnership). https://www.gbpuat.ac.in/
C. Rangarajan, "An Eminent Scientist and a Great Humanist", Review of Agrarian Studies 13:2 (2023) (wheat output 11.39 million tonnes in 1966–67, 26.41 million tonnes in 1971–72). https://ras.org.in/articles/319/text/article.html
The Tribune, "Explainer: Growing burden of free power", 22 April 2025. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/punjab/explainer-growing-burden-of-free-power
Central Ground Water Board, Dynamic Ground Water Resources and Ground Water Quality of Punjab, 2024 (December 2024), stage of extraction 156.87 per cent. https://cgwb.gov.in/cgwbpnm/public/uploads/documents/1742295732461871757file.pdf. State ranking: ThePrint, report on the national 2024 assessment, 24 January 2025. https://theprint.in/science/indias-groundwater-recharge-went-up-in-last-7-yrs-but-5-states-extracting-over-100-of-their-share/2460378
Bhagavad Gītā 3.35. Sanskrit text: Gita Supersite, IIT Kanpur. https://heritage.iitk.ac.in/SBG/3.35
Bhagavad Gītā 18.41 and 18.47. Gita Supersite, IIT Kanpur. https://heritage.iitk.ac.in/SBG/18.41 and https://heritage.iitk.ac.in/SBG/18.47
International Institute for Population Sciences and partners, Longitudinal Ageing Study in India (LASI) Wave 1, 2017–18: India Report, living arrangements of persons aged 60 and over (with spouse and children 40.6 per cent, with children and others 27.6 per cent). https://www.iipsindia.ac.in/sites/default/files/other_files/LASI_W1_Elderly_India.pdf
Bhagavad Gītā 2.50. Gita Supersite, IIT Kanpur. https://heritage.iitk.ac.in/SBG/2.50
Lokmat Times, "ISRO opts for 'failure-based' design for Chandrayaan-3 after earlier debacle", July 2023 (S. Somanath). https://www.lokmattimes.com/technology/isro-opts-for-failure-based-design-for-chandrayaan-3-after-earlier-debacle-a475
Business Today, "Chandrayaan-3's 'failure-based design' is key to its Moon landing", 22 August 2023. https://www.businesstoday.in/amp/latest/trends/story/chandrayaan-3s-failure-based-design-is-key-to-its-moon-landing-heres-what-it-is-395015-2023-08-22
Bhagavad Gītā 3.20–3.21. Gita Supersite, IIT Kanpur. https://heritage.iitk.ac.in/SBG/3.21
Ṛgveda 1.89.1, trans. Ralph T. H. Griffith, The Hymns of the Rigveda (1896). https://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/rigveda/rv01089.htm
Nyāya Sūtra of Gautama 1.2.1–3, trans. Satisa Chandra Vidyabhusana, The Nyāya Sūtras of Gotama (Allahabad: Pāṇini Office, 1913). Sūtra numbering as cited in Yasutaka Sudo, conference paper on debate in classical India, 6th Tokyo Conference on Argumentation (2020): https://japan-debate-association.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/6thTCA2020_Proceedingspp.154-161_Sudo.pdf. See also B. K. Matilal, The Character of Logic in India (SUNY Press, 1998), 31–59.
Śaṅkara, Brahmasūtrabhāṣya 2.2, trans. George Thibaut, The Vedānta-Sūtras with the Commentary by Śaṅkarācārya, Sacred Books of the East 34 (Oxford, 1890).
Mādhava, Sarva-darśana-saṃgraha, trans. E. B. Cowell and A. E. Gough (London, 1882), "Appendix on the Upādhi" (upādhi defined as what always accompanies the major term but not always the middle term; the example of wet fuel and the red-hot iron ball). https://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/the-sarva-darsana-samgraha/d/doc79761.html
Vātsyāyana, Nyāyabhāṣya, opening sentence (pramāṇato 'rthapratipattau pravṛttisāmarthyād arthavat pramāṇam), text and translation in Taisei Shida, "The Theory of Truth in the Classical Nyāya System: On the Condition of Pravṛtti and the Means of Justification", Saṃbhāṣā 24 (2004), p. 117, n. 5. https://nagoya.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/17179/files/4_SAMBHASA-24.pdf
David Pingree, The Yavanajātaka of Sphujidhvaja (Harvard University Press, 1978). Bill M. Mak, "The Date and Nature of Sphujidhvaja's Yavanajātaka Reconsidered in the Light of Some Newly Discovered Materials", History of Science in South Asia 1 (2013), abstract. https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/hssa/index.php/hssa/article/view/7
Monier-Williams, s.v. horā ("from Greek ὥρα"), kendra ("borrowed from Greek κέντρον") and liptā ("= λεπτή, a minute"). https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/hora, https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/kendra and https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/lipta
Varāhamihira, Bṛhatsaṃhitā 2.14, ed. with Hindi translation by Achyutananda Jha (2001), via Wisdom Library. https://de.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/brihat-samhita-sanskrit/d/doc1218183.html
J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson, "The trigonometric functions", MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews (Āryabhaṭa's half-chord tables, jyā, Arabic jība and jayb, Latin sinus). https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Trigonometric_functions/. For the full history: Kim Plofker, Mathematics in India (Princeton University Press, 2009).
Constituent Assembly Debates, vol. VII, 4 November 1948, speech of B. R. Ambedkar moving the Draft Constitution, pp. 37–39 of the official report. https://cdnbbsr.s3waas.gov.in/s3ec0490f1f4972d133619a60c30f3559e/uploads/2024/07/2024070841.pdf
Constitution of India project, "B. R. Ambedkar's Defence of Constitutional Borrowing". https://www.constitutionofindia.net/blog/b-r-ambedkars-defence-of-constitutional-borrowing/
Constituent Assembly Debates, vol. VII, 22 November 1948, K. Santhanam's amendment inserting new Article 31-A (now Article 40). https://www.constitutionofindia.net/debates/22-nov-1948/
Alice H. Amsden, Asia's Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization (Oxford University Press, 1989). Paraphrased from the publisher's description, which states the principle of reciprocity: https://books.google.com/books/about/Asia_s_Next_Giant.html?id=f0hDv51qS6MC
Korea Development Institute, K-Developedia, "Agrarian Land Reform" (Farmland Reform Act 1949, revised 1950): https://www.kdevelopedia.org/Development-Overview/all/agrariland-reform--74.do. Chinese-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, Rice Improvement in Taiwan (Taipei, 1959) (rent reduction 1949, sale of public land 1951, land-to-the-tiller 1953): https://kmweb.moa.gov.tw/redirect_files.php?id=170591
Douglas A. Irwin, "From Hermit Kingdom to Miracle on the Han: Policy Decisions that Transformed South Korea into an Export Powerhouse", NBER Working Paper 29299 (2021), pp. 6 and 41 (US aid financed about 70 per cent of imports, 1953–61; GATT membership, May 1967). https://www.nber.org/papers/w29299
Seung-Ho Kwon, "Industrial Relations in South Korea: An Historical Analysis", Working Paper 112, School of Industrial Relations and Organisational Behaviour, University of New South Wales (1997), p. 8 ("unions were repressed and subordinated to the policy of rapid industrialisation"). https://core.ac.uk/download/51181001.pdf
Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, release on the production-linked incentive schemes, 7 April 2021, ID 1710134 ("incentives on incremental sales from products manufactured in India, over the base year"; outlay ₹1.97 lakh crore), as reproduced at https://taxguru.in/?p=765067
PTI via ETV Bharat, "Government disburses Rs 28,748 crore under 14 PLI schemes till Dec last year", 20 February 2026. https://www.etvbharat.com/en/business/government-disburses-rs-28748-crore-under-14-pli-schemes-till-dec-last-year-enn26022003394
US Social Security Administration, press release on the 2026 Annual Report of the Social Security Board of Trustees, 9 June 2026 (retirement fund depleted in the fourth quarter of 2032, 78 per cent then payable. Combined funds 2034, 83 per cent then payable). https://www.ssa.gov/news/en/press/releases/2026-06-09.html
International Labour Organization and Institute for Human Development, India Employment Report 2024: Youth employment, education and skills (March 2024), p. 3 ("around 90 per cent of workers are informally employed"). https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/2024-08/India%20Employment%20-%20web_8%20April.pdf
Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, press release on the Time Use Survey 2024, 25 February 2025 (persons aged six and above, minutes per day per participant in unpaid caregiving for household members). https://mospi.gov.in/sites/default/files/press_release/PR_TUS_25022025.pdf
How this was written
I read the ASER 2024 national report, Pritchett's 2009 paper, the Teaching at the Right Level evaluation, Ambedkar's speech of 4 November 1948 and the debate of 22 November 1948 in the official record, the Review of Agrarian Studies papers on the wheat, the LASI, time-use, groundwater and ILO reports, the 2026 US Social Security trustees' release, and the Sanskrit verses in the editions named. Translations of verses are my plain renderings unless a translator is named.
I could not open Amsden's book, so her argument is paraphrased from the publisher's description and no page is given. I read the Nyāya Sūtra, Śaṅkara's commentary and Pingree's and Mak's studies only through translations, abstracts and scholarly summaries named in the sources. The opening of Vātsyāyana's commentary is read through Shida's translation, not a critical edition. The founding date of the Food Corporation of India rests on a secondary source. Charles Metcalfe's minute is often dated 7 November 1830, but I could not see the original, so the year is left out.
The reading of vikasita as a national hypothesis, the reading of svadharma as starting conditions, the rule of the pūrvapakṣa as a single convention, the use of upādhi and pravṛtti-sāmarthya for borrowing, and the five questions are my constructions. The Nyāya and Gītā authors were not thinking about development.
What would change the conclusion: evidence that copied institutions in India perform as well as grafted ones, or that a form copied without its conditions came to work on its own over time without anyone measuring and adjusting it. Firm evidence that the production-linked schemes have produced firms that export without support would also change the verdict in Part Six.
One person in this essay is imagined: Meena, the Class 5 pupil in the Opening and the Ending. Her school is an imagined composite.
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