The book, ‘India — the Road to Renaissance: A Vision and an Agenda’ by Bhimeswara Chall

While India is preoccupied with its next general election, the real issues that could determine what kind of a people and society we should aim to be are pushed under the carpet. It is such issues that this book seeks to flush out and flag. It is both audacious and ambitious in its identification of what ails India and how to fix it., When India, at last, became free to chart its own course, it chose ‘colonial’ continuity. That got reflected as an entirely un-Indian Constitution and Westminster-style of governance and trickle-down economic model. The two malaises that are afflicting our nation are near moral meltdown and pervasive mediocrity. In addition, we became a soft society, prone to ‘exceptional escapism and Faustian-choice making’.,

The book proposes a package of radical reforms intended to shift the very epicenter of political and economic decision-making to the level where people live their daily lives. As a part of the ‘package’, we need to supplant the current one by India’s first Indian Constitution, inspired by its own traditions and practices. In addition, the Constitution must also introduce and empower grassroots self-governance; make the needs of the ‘most-needy’ the fulcrum of the growth strategy, and replace election by voting by what the ancient Greeks called sortition, election by lot, a system that was also in vogue in parts of India too in its history., What is significant is that it does not end with a pious wish-list; it offers concrete ideas on how to concretize and implement the suggested reforms. About The Author: Bhimeswara Challa, born in 1935, is a native of India and a ‘double-retiree’, one from the elite Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and the other from the United Nations. During a career stretched over forty years, he shouldered multiple responsibilities, from the grassroots to the global, which gave him at once an insider’s depth and an outsider’s objectivity. Alongside, he has been a part-time but passionate