The Indian state's performance spans the spectrum from woefully inadequate, especially in core public goods provision, to surprisingly impressive in successfully managing complex tasks and on a massive scale. It has delivered better on macroeconomic rather than microeconomic outcomes, where delivery is episodic with inbuilt exit than where delivery and accountability are quotidian and more reliant on state capacity at local levels, and on those goods and services where societal norms on hierarchy and status matter less than where they are resilient. The paper highlights three reasons for these outcomes: under-resourced local governments, the long-term effects of India's "precocious" democracy, and the persistence of social cleavage. However, claims that India's state is bloated in size and submerged in patronage have weak basis. The paper concludes by highlighting a reversal of past trends in that state capacity is improving at the micro level even as India's macro performance has become more worrisome.

中文翻译：

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为什么印度国家既失败又成功？

印度邦的表现涵盖了从严重不足（尤其是在核心公共物品供应方面）到令人惊讶的令人印象深刻的成功成功完成大规模任务的范围。它在宏观经济而不是微观经济成果上取得了更好的效果，在宏观经济成果方面，交付是具有内置退出退出的情节，而不是交付和问责制是quotidian，并且更依赖于地方层面的国家能力，以及那些对等级制度和地位的社会规范影响较小的商品和服务比他们有弹性的地方。该论文强调了产生这些结果的三个原因：资源贫乏的地方政府，印度“早熟”民主的长期影响以及社会分裂的持续存在。但是，声称印度 国家的规模size肿，淹没光顾的基础薄弱。本文最后总结了过去趋势的逆转，即即使印度的宏观表现变得更加令人担忧，国家的能力也在微观水平上有所提高。