Most of us have been conditioned to believe that a nation’s destiny shifts only through seismic, “Big Bang” legislation—massive, sweeping laws that completely overhaul the system, dominating evening broadcasts and shaking parliament. Yet, per Sanjeev Sanyal, Member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, the truest foundation for a developed India is being laid far away from the limelight. It is being built on a quiet, relentless machinery of Process Reforms—the day-to-day administrative fixes that smooth out how the government actually functions.
Relying on the Pareto Principle—the economic rule of thumb suggesting that 80% of positive outcomes stem from just 20% of well-targeted efforts—Sanyal observes that building a world-class economy does not always require colossal new laws. Sometimes, it simply requires clarity and the meticulous scrubbing of outdated regulations.
For decades, India functioned like an athlete running a marathon with stones in their shoes, burdened by complex rules that forced honest businesses into courtrooms out of sheer confusion. By clearing out these regulatory cobwebs in our own heads, the nation is finally transitioning from a stagnant pond of bureaucratic gatekeepers to the high seas of global enterprise.
To understand the staggering cost of these cobwebs, one only needs to look at how we treated modern workplaces before the pandemic. For years, an obscure set of 1990s-era telecom regulations known as the Other Service Provider (OSP) rules quietly choked the IT sector.
Under this regime, working from home was technically illegal without a deeply entrenched ‘Shashtang Pranam,’ forcing companies to maintain completely separate hardware for domestic and international work. It took the unprecedented exogenous shock of the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns for the state to realize that these rules were the primary barrier to economic survival.
By taking a massive eraser to this regulatory cruft in late 2020 and 2021, the government didn’t just save the industry; it sparked a change that no one had thought of.
That India is now the undisputed Global Capability Center (GCC) capital of the world, a testament to the immense economic energy unlocked simply by getting out of the way.
This approach of removing administrative bottlenecks, a strategy of systematically unblocking the flow of business rather than writing entirely new laws, has similarly transformed India’s intellectual property landscape, turning a sluggish process into a highly efficient engine for growth. Less than a decade ago, the Indian patent system functioned as a bureaucratic graveyard where innovation went to die.
In 2015, the office received 45,000 applications but granted a mere 6,000, creating a massive traffic jam that rivals exploited through last-minute objections to stall competitors indefinitely. By aggressively hiring hundreds of new officers and upgrading digital infrastructure, the government effectively bulldozed these toll booths.
Fast forward to the recent financial year, and India granted a staggering 100,000 patents. Yet, this triumph has exposed a new reality: the bottleneck is no longer the bureaucracy, but rather the private sector’s sluggish pace in R&D, with a vast majority of recent patents still being awarded to foreign entities. The state is finally ahead of the curve; the burden of momentum now rests entirely on Indian industry.
This reluctance of domestic industry to claim global leadership is profoundly visible in the professional services sector. It is a glaring paradox that India produces the exact talent running global consulting titans- the “Big Seven”, yet fails to produce an indigenous equivalent capable of rivaling them.
I find Sanyal’s observation on this worth considering. He traces this failure to professional bodies, such as the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) and the Bar Council, which he argues operate like Medieval Guilds. For those unaware of Medieval Guilds, these used to enforce an archaic segregation, structurally preventing Multidisciplinary Partnerships (MDPs). Under these rules, a brilliant accountant cannot partner with a top-tier lawyer or cybersecurity expert to offer the comprehensive, full-stack solutions that global firms provide.
The justification: a fear of untrained professionals meddling in specialized work is a logical fallacy.
As Sanyal ironically points out, a hospital seamlessly employs specialized surgeons alongside accountants and furniture makers; sharing a corporate roof does not mean the carpenter is performing open-heart surgery.
Compounding this self-inflicted wound are bizarre restrictions on branding. While foreign firms spend billions on global thought leadership, Indian professional firms were historically policed on typography, barred from advertising with a font size exceeding 14 points to prevent solicitation.
Add to this a discriminatory government tendering process that routinely demands a massive Rs. 500 crore turnover for a mere Rs. 3 crore advisory contract, and the system effectively suffocates Indian startups before they can even scale.
To truly compete, these medieval guilds must embrace the modern era, utilizing mechanisms like “Chinese walls” to separate auditing from consulting, and finally granting Indian professionals the freedom to build global brands.
Just as we must modernise how we regulate our professionals, Sanyal warns that we must completely rethink how we regulate our technology, particularly Artificial Intelligence. As the world debates AI safety, the European Union has leaned heavily into a bureaucratic approach, attempting to categorize AI tools into static risk buckets. Sanyal wholly rejects this, arguing that AI is a “Complex Adaptive System”- much like a financial market or biological evolution- where future behavior is inherently unpredictable.
The recent CrowdStrike outage, where a tiny static code error paralyzed global aviation, serves as a dire warning of the “butterfly effect” in interconnected systems. To prevent a localized AI failure from cascading into an apocalyptic digital wildfire, Sanyal proposes a framework borrowed from finance, built on four dynamic pillars: automated circuit breakers to halt spiraling systems, hardcoded manual overrides for human intervention, explainability audits forcing algorithms to justify their decisions, and strict compartmentalization to ensure a failure in healthcare AI does not crash the financial grid.
Yet, preparing for the future requires more than just regulating technology; it demands a clear-eyed view of the people who will live in it. For decades, the narrative of India as the world’s endlessly growing nation has been fueled by a persistent anxiety over overpopulation. Sanyal argues that this mindset is dangerously obsolete.
While the global replacement rate for a stable population is 2.1, India’s historic gender imbalances and child mortality rates mean our actual required replacement rate is closer to 2.3 or 2.4. The startling reality, revealed by recent demographic data, is that India’s Total Fertility Rate has already plunged to 1.9, with urban centers like Bengal dropping as low as 1.2.
Demographic history offers a grim lesson: no nation has ever successfully reversed a collapsing fertility rate once it falls this far below replacement.
The true crisis awaiting India in 25 years is not a scarcity of space, but a massive, aging population severely lacking a young tax base to support it. We must abandon the rhetoric of population control and prepare for an era of demographic contraction. More on the overpopulation myth can be watched here.
Ultimately, surviving these shifts and forging a developed nation is a matter of culture. Economic vitality is deeply downstream of a society’s appetite for risk. To inspire a psychological renaissance and remind India of its inherently mercantile heritage, Sanyal recently spearheaded the INSV Kaundinya project. Based on 5th-century Ajanta cave paintings, this 19.6-meter ship was painstakingly reconstructed using ancient stitching techniques, bound entirely with coir rope, coconut fiber, and natural resins, without a single metal nail.
When this vessel successfully sailed across the Indian Ocean to Oman, it did more than complete a voyage; it shattered the colonial myth that ancient Indians were an insular, landlocked people terrified of the sea.
The stitched ship stands as a profound metaphor for the modern Indian economy. The cobwebs holding the nation back are not merely in the statute books; they are deeply internalized in the collective psyche. Whether it is tearing up outdated telecom rules, untethering professional firms from medieval guilds, building dynamic circuit breakers for AI, or confronting our shrinking demographics, the mission is identical.
The era of protecting a small, safe pond is over. Through a thousand invisible process reforms, India is systematically mending its sails, finally preparing to navigate the high seas of global excellence.
