Modi’s million dollar challenge: How to fix Yogi Adityanath’s UP?

Anyone who wants India to live up to its potential has to figure out how to fix UP.

Politics of India :   Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, is also its greatest challenge. It has about as many people as Brazil but, according to Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, suffers from development indicators more similar to sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else in Asia. Anyone who wants India to live up to its potential has to figure out how to fix UP. And that isn’t going to be easy. You’d need somehow to turn investors positive on a state burdened by overstretched infrastructure, an unqualified workforce, endemic corruption, hours-long power cuts and widespread lawlessness.

Last week, the state’s chief minister, a controversial monk-turned-politician who calls himself “Yogi” Adityanath, held a giant “investor summit” in UP’s capital, Lucknow. Modi’s choice of Adityanath to lead the state last year shocked many; the pugnacious Hindu nationalist is better known for his history of startling anti-Muslim rhetoric than for his pronouncements on policy or governance. The investor summit was part of Adityanath’s ongoing attempt to demonstrate that he is, in fact, as much a development-focused leader as Modi himself — and, perhaps, the front-runner to succeed Modi as prime minister.

So how did this coming-out party go? Well, it was certainly well-attended. The prime minister himself opened the summit and 20 of his ministers turned up to turn on the spigot of federal spending. They promised billions of dollars of investment in roads, waterways, airports and even something called a “defense corridor,” a plan apparently worked out in about 18 days.

The private sector was also in attendance and only mildly less enthusiastic. The UP government announced that, by the end of the summit, investor agreements worth Rs 4.2 trillion ($64 billion) had been signed. Such ‘memorandums of understanding’ have a peculiar ritual significance in Indian politics: They’re designed for both sides to bask in the glow of warm newspaper headlines, without any expectation that the pledges will actually be fulfilled.

The ritual was invented, like the state-level investor summit itself, by Modi when he was chief minister of Gujarat. Both are now widely imitated. Such announcements are, of course, costless for the private sector and, if UP’s summit is anything like Gujarat’s, we shouldn’t expect that a commensurate amount of investment will materialize.

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