AN IDEALIST'S PLAN FOR A FAB INDIA.

TO THE uninitiated, William Bissell talking of making India work sounds suspiciously like a Johnny- come- lately Orientalist. Add Nanda for a middle name and the plot gets curioser and curioser, given that the author harps on his part- American lineage to emphasise the insider- outsider dialectic informing his gaze.

But when one is told that William Nanda Bissell heads Fabindia, one of the largest craft- based marketing organisations in the world and the company that reinvented ethnic chic for the beau monde, you read, intently. Making India Work is about the audacity of hope. It rues the fact that we, as a nation, have been a bunch of arrivistes with a predilection for arriving at the high table when the rest are clearing out -- taking to Fabian socialism two decades after it was past its sell- by date, nationalising the " commanding heights" of the economy just before the idea lost its worldwide appeal, and now bristling about consumptiondriven growth when the rest of the world is at least pretending to go green.

The book is a clarion call to action and an impassioned plea for sustainable development.

But it seeks not so much to subvert the country's system as to refashion it radically. Bissell sources data from rural Sewari in Rajasthan, small- town Mussoorie in Uttarakhand and uber- urban Panchsheel in New Delhi to moot a new economic system of cashless transactions and a multiplicity of exchanges for trading goods and services. He unveils tax reforms that do away with taxes on productive activity and income and introduces windfall taxes on property, inheritance and all transactions.

The schema projects revenues at nearly double the present levels. Financial instruments such as Targeted Catalysts -- credits to be used against the six essential services: nutrition, drinking water, sewage disposal, education, health care and legal assistance -- are billed as vehicles of deliverance from squalour for India Unshining.

The revolution in taxation is dovetailed with reform in governance.

The author proposes appropriate scaling of institutions, turning the inverted power pyramid on its head to empower communities and make them the fundamental building blocks of democracy.

Municipalities and panchayats, blocks and subdivisions, districts, divisions and states get the axe. The right- sized government comprises 48,000 community boards, 480 area councils, 48 regional legislatures and a unicameral Parliament of 480 MPs. The transition to the new system is predicated on a political party romping home.

Making India Work , then, is truly provocative.

But at its worst, it peddles utopia in dystopia. The framework of a homogenous unit, one where the quotidian concerns of caste, religion and region melt away as a result of growing prosperity and targeted catalysts, overlooks the complexities of a nation with a one- billion- plus population.

Hoping for a lawmaker or mandarin -- present or future -- to be in raptures over the ideas the book posits and ringing in a revolution can only be evanescent hope, at best, for the leviathan that is government moves only from the pressure civil society brings to bear on it. The by- now established trade in carbon credits, a market mechanism devised to drive industrial and commercial processes in the direction of less carbon- intensive approaches, is illustrative of governments being driven to enforce an idea whose time has come.

In that sense, the book is a must- read for all believers of the nation as an ' imagined community'. Its ideas need much wider dissemination than in the corridors of North Block and South Block. Change is happening. The idea of leaving a low carbon footprint for posterity is catching on.

And the Unique Identification Authority of India is expected to create the world's largest citizen database in three years.

But are we to trade the potability of drinking water on bourses? Should we swing on a star, and be better off than we are, or should we remain pigs? Someday, the pigs will surely fly. For now, just ensure you don't get the swine flu.

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