There has always been debate about India's underdevelopment and problem of governance not only at the level of intellectual and academic discourse, but also among ordinary people. Why has India remained economically underdeveloped and politically ungovernable? Although India's economy has been growing at a rate of more than 9 per cent and the number of USD millionaires has grown by 20.5 per cent, which is second only to Singapore, India's economy has been, in comparison to East and Southeast Asia, afflicted by poverty and underdevelopment. This growth in India is, in fact, very recent. The blame for India's problem of governance and economic underdevelopment is often attributed to India's “democracy”. The case of Singapore and some other Asian countries, has led some to consider strong, authoritarian governments to be positively correlated with economic growth.

There have been many explanations in political sociology about the relationship between development and democracy and I often have felt handicapped in attempting to explain such problems in terms of pure practicality, rather than in abstract theoretical terms. There are many theories which explain that there is a very strong and positive correlation between economic prosperity and development of democracy. Huntington has argued that the “third wave” of democratization is a result of the economic development which has led to the rise of the urban middle class and created “new sources of wealth and power outside the state and a functional need to devolve decision-making”. Many of the countries in East and Southeast Asia and in the Middle East have proven the “third wave” theorists, who believe that economic growth and emergence of the middle class will further the process of democratization, wrong. Similarly, many have also argued that democracy is impossible in situations where poverty, illiteracy, and inequality continue to dominate the socio-political climate; and that India, however, has successfully defied this proposition.

Though the governments (irrespective of party affiliations) play a significant role in shaping a country's economic development, the type of regime (democracy or authoritarianism) that a country is following has little to do with its economic development. India's problem of governance and economic underdevelopment is not because of its democracy but the result of its successive corrupt and inefficient governments.