India's journey has been distinctively 'precocious' in comparative terms. It opted for democracy before development and social change, promoted high-skilled services before and over low-skilled manufacturing and chose a globalization that favoured exports of talented people and short-changed the poor. The socialist state became an inefficiently capitalist one before providing the public goods of physical infrastructure and human capital. The outcomes have been surprising, with the country achieving success in creating and sustaining democracy, albeit flawed, and maintaining a modicum of order.

Four decades of economic dynamism and the emergence of a somewhat more capable Indian state has meant that it is able to build infrastructure and deliver the essentials of life to its population at scale-still not without disappointments, but a massive improvement over the past. Just as India's aspiration has lifted to building 'world-class' statues, temples, bullet trains, airports and digital systems, the undermining of some of the real achievements of democracy, federalism and nation-building stand in the way.

As the world gets radically upended, India's development odyssey is at a critical juncture. A Sixth of Humanity is an attempt to trace how one of the largest and most diverse countries in the world, uniquely and daringly, attempted four concurrent transformations-building a state, creating an economy, changing society and forging a sense of nationhood-under conditions of universal suffrage.