Something BAD Is Happening to India's Capital

The rung those 4.8 million people were reaching for is the bottom one.

Every country that got rich climbed the same ladder, farms at the bottom, factories in the middle, offices and services at the top.

You move people off the land and into a shed with machines in it.

The shed pays better than the land.

Their children get the office job.

Britain did it over a century.

Japan did it faster.

South Korea did it in about 30 years, and it was ugly, and it worked.

As far as I can tell, it's the only route anybody has ever found.

India put more than a billion people at the foot of that ladder.

The middle rung is missing.

Roughly 43 to 45% of Indian workers are still in agriculture, depending which survey year you take.

I'll use the range rather than pick whichever end suits me.

Manufacturing employs about one worker in nine.

Between those two figures sits a gap where a factory economy is supposed to be, and the people crossing it have nowhere to put their feet.

That's why 4.8 million adults fought over 60,000 police uniforms.

A uniform is a rung.

It comes with a salary, a pension, and a name badge.

In an economy that is 90% informal, those are close to rare metals.

So watch the direction of travel rather than the size of the gap.

The direction is the part nobody expects.

You'd assume when an economy grows this fast, it pulls people off the farms.

So would I. It's the most reliable pattern in development economics, and it has held nearly everywhere for 200 years.

In India, it ran backwards.

The share of Indian workers in agriculture had fallen for five decades.