Good governance is not a final product. It represents a continuous quest and an endless effort. The quest is for mass prosperity and liberal democracy, and the effort is towards sustaining and upgrading whatever level of good governance has been accomplished. Whereas the desirable contents of mass prosperity and liberal democracy are subjects of perennial though familiar debates, an author can save the time of readers by communicating candidly his own preferences and priorities. As of January 2001, the date of publication of this book, India cannot claim to have reached the attainable level of good governance. It has failed to adopt/implement policies conducive to such an optimum use of available human/material resources as to replace mass poverty by mass prosperity. The gap between potentialities and actualities remains wide. Lapses in economic, political, social and administrative fields are as numerous as they are noticeable. In order to explore the most pragmatic way to remove these lapses, the author has tested public policy and governmental performance in the light of ground realities. For this purpose, he has consulted an amazing variety of primary and secondary source materials, and has not allowed orthodoxy to obstruct the search for truth. This has enabled him to pay necessary attention to crucial developments in national/state capitals as also in remote rural areas. The easy blending of cross-disciplinary macro analyses with an immense assembly of micro assessments endows this book with a rare richness.
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