How to Think About Samaaj, Sarkaar, and Bazaar
| AUTHOR | Pranay Kotasthane |
| DATE | October 20, 2026 |
| CATEGORIES | Public Policy State Capacity |
I recently took a session for Life Lessons, the online course taught by Amit Varma and Mohit Satyanand. In keeping with the theme of the course, I tried to explain the meta-ideas that underlie how states, markets, and societies work.
The meta-lens I discussed was that human affairs are complex adaptive systems. We have good theories of how markets fail and good theories of how states fail, but almost none for how and why societies fail. And these three systems act on each other, all the time, which makes policy a problem of complex systems. There are non-linear effects, feedback loops, emergence, path dependence, and leverage points.
I then offered four ideas using the lens of complexity:
- Bazaar: what matters most at our stage? At low incomes, growth is the leverage point where a push travels farthest. “Beyond GDP” is a rich country’s argument.
- Sarkaar: the omniabsent trap. The Indian state is small in spending, people, and local capacity, but big in ambition. In India, every failure of the state becomes a demand for more state.
I discussed the omniabsent Indian state with Shital Pawar of the Sakal Media Group earlier this year. Watch it here.
Samaaj: defence against the dark arts. The rarer an event, the more news it makes. More reported is not more prevalent, and rising outrage often means the bar has been raised.
Samaaj: living in the information age. Social media widens our reference networks, stretches the Overton window, and gives disproportionate rewards to extreme content.
I discussed these three mechanisms of social media on a All Things Policy episode with Shrikrishna.
The closing lesson I discussed was that complexity tells us to look for policy ingredients, not policy recipes. Copying the form of another country’s success without its function, whether chaebols or cycle tracks, rarely works. No recipe guarantees the outcome, but given the right ingredients, change can emerge when we least expect it.
As expected, there were some fantastic questions and discussion. I am making the slides open access.
More such frameworks are collected at frameworks.pranaykotas.com.