India, Jan. 31 -- With the Union Budget due on February 1 - amid external headwinds - the focus is on keeping to a development path that serves India well. To do this, learning from history is as important as looking to the future. Against this backdrop, political scientist Devesh Kapur and former chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian's A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India's Development Odyssey offers clear-eyed insights. The book looks back at the policy course India took over the past close-to-eight decades, analysing the choices made, where these worked, where they faltered, and the contexts that redeem some of these. It flits between a general view from above and scrutinising aspects of the journey so far, underlining implicitly in each case why familiar narratives about India's economy may not always be adequate. A key part of the book outlines the paradox of a State that both overreached and undershot remit in specific contexts....