In 1998, onions brought down a government. The price of the humble vegetable soared across north India, touching levels that seemed extraordinary at the time. Households complained, newspapers carried daily stories, and political opponents found an easy rallying point. When Delhi voted later that year, the BJP suffered a decisive defeat. Economists could have pointed out that onions accounted for only a tiny fraction of GDP and a modest share of household expenditure. Yet that was beside the point. Voters were not responding to an economic model. They were responding to an everyday experience. Onion prices had become a visible symbol of a government’s competence.
A few years later, Rajat Gupta and his colleagues at McKinsey presented an ambitious blueprint to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on how India could accelerate economic growth. The recommendations were comprehensive and technically sound. After listening patiently, Vajpayee reportedly asked a simple question: “Ye sab to theek hai Guptaji, magar ye sab hoga kaise?” The remark captured a truth that many policy discussions continue to overlook. Identifying what should be done is often the easiest part of policy-making. The harder task is understanding how change actually occurs.
At first glance, the onion crisis and Vajpayee’s response to a management consultant appear unrelated. In reality, they highlight the same blind spot. The first showed that societies do not react to economic variables in the neat manner assumed by textbooks. The second showed that technically desirable outcomes are meaningless unless they can be translated into political and social reality. Together, they offer a useful lens through which to view many contemporary policy debates.
Structural Disconnect
Consider the recent discussion around rising oil prices and India’s vulnerability to external energy shocks. Economists, energy experts, and commentators have offered a familiar list of prescriptions. India should accelerate electric vehicle (EV) adoption. It should expand renewable energy (RE) capacity. It should encourage households to shift to induction cooking. It should electrify transport and reduce dependence on imported hydrocarbons. Most of these recommendations address a genuine strategic challenge. Yet they are often presented as responses to a current crisis when they are, in fact, long-term structural transformations.
An oil shock is an immediate problem. It raises inflation, worsens the current account deficit, and strains household budgets today. EVs, induction cooktops, and RE investments may help reduce future dependence on imported oil, but they do little to address the immediate consequences of a price spike. More importantly, their adoption depends on factors that extend far beyond economics.
An EV is not simply a substitute for a petrol-powered vehicle. Consumers evaluate charging infrastructure, resale values, reliability, repair networks, and convenience. A household’s cooking choices are influenced not merely by energy costs but also by cuisine, habits, kitchen design, and cultural preferences. The assumption that people will automatically shift to a superior technological alternative once incentives are aligned often underestimates the complexity of human behaviour.
This is where sociology and economic history become indispensable. Economics excels at identifying incentives and trade-offs. It is less effective at explaining how habits change, how institutions evolve, and why societies respond differently to identical policy interventions. Yet these questions often determine whether a reform succeeds or fails.
Copy-Paste Fallacy
The tendency to overlook such factors is particularly evident in comparisons with China. Whenever India confronts a structural challenge, someone inevitably points to China’s experience. China adopted EVs rapidly; therefore, India should do the same. China built manufacturing scale quickly; therefore, India should replicate the model. Such comparisons ignore the fact that China’s outcomes were shaped by a combination of state capacity, industrial policy, urbanisation patterns, and political institutions. Development is not a technology that can be imported. It is a social process that unfolds differently across countries.
Economic history offers similar lessons. Successful transformations rarely occur according to expert timelines. Industrialisation, urbanisation, financial inclusion, and consumer adoption have all taken decades, not years. They have involved experimentation, resistance, adaptation, and unintended consequences. The journey has usually proved far messier than the original blueprint.
The problem is not that economists are wrong. The problem is that economics has increasingly come to dominate policy conversations at the expense of other disciplines. Policy-making today often resembles an engineering exercise: identify the optimal solution, align incentives, and expect society to comply. But societies do not function like machines. They are collections of individuals, communities, and institutions, each responding to incentives through the filter of culture, experience, and circumstance.
The result is a recurring gap between policy aspiration and policy execution. Experts produce technically elegant solutions. Governments announce ambitious targets. Yet implementation frequently falls short because the social and political dimensions of change were treated as secondary considerations. The question Vajpayee asked remains unanswered.
India does not need fewer economists. It needs economists who engage more deeply with sociology, politics, and history. The most useful policy advice is not merely about identifying the destination. It is about understanding the route, the obstacles along the way, and the people who must travel it.
Voters do not experience the economy as economists do. And societies do not change because a technically superior solution has been identified. The first question of economics may be what should happen. The first question of politics is what people will accept. The first question of sociology is how people actually behave.