Former McKinsey chief Rajat Gupta interviews the man in the perenially blue turban in the McKinsey Quarterly (registration required). I bet he pronounces the name right. It’s two free-marketers talking to each other, the benefit of having an economist occupying 7 Race Course Road.

Singh says his top priority isn’t high tech or special export zones, it’s electrifying villages. He’s talking about the basic heavy lifting of a long-delayed national bootstrap:

We have, for the next four to five years, a very ambitious plan to expand… the availability of electricity to all of our villages…

When I look at countries like South Korea, all children who are of secondary-school-going age are in school; our children drop out even before they complete primary school… we are making, for the first time, the most determined effort to ensure that all our children… in the next four or five years have the benefit of minimum primary schooling.

Beyond upgrading airports, his administration is also spending on ports and railroads:

We are working with the Japanese government to draw up a program in which the freight corridors between Mumbai-Delhi, Mumbai-Chennai, and Delhi-Kolkata can be modernized. Our estimate is that that will cost about 25 thousand crore of rupees [$5.7 billion], and that’s our high priority as far as the railway system is concerned… We also are now in the process of modernizing our seaports.

The Indian government’s policy naming schemes are an odd hangover cocktail of faceless socialist, stymied bureaucrat and shudh Hindi or Sanskrit:

The Common Minimum Program, which is the benchmark for us to assess where we want to go, talks about the navratnas. These navratnas are companies essentially in the oil sectors, the power sectors, which are doing really well…

Gupta asks him the cultural question, but ‘Gantt charts’ aren’t an entirely satisfying answer:

Whenever people discuss India… in the end, the pace of implementation and actual results often lag behind. There isn’t that kind of action bias that you would like to see in the country.

… because we are a federal set-up, there are a lot of things that the central government does, but there are many things, like getting land, getting water, getting electricity–in all these matters the state government comes in, the local authority comes in… we need to… cut down on this rigmarole of many tiers of decision-making processes…

We’ve got the [South] Koreans involved in building a steel plant of 12 million tons’ capacity. Right from the beginning the center and the state governments were working together to ensure that whatever milestones are agreed upon, those milestones were tracked–how they move forward, whether the work proceeds, if there are bottlenecks, to identify those bottlenecks and ensure that those bottlenecks are resolved.

On the plus side, the Indian savings rate is around the same as Japan’s, ~27% vs. the U.S.’ 0%:

… our savings rate has shot up in the last couple of years to about 27 to 28 percent of our GDP.