NEW DELHI — She is 7 years old, covered in dirt and spends her days asking for food from pedestrians and drivers in one of this city’s central business districts.

Her name is Rohini, and other than pleading for bread, she had little to say when asked about her life. Instead, she threaded her way through thick traffic to her mother, Kamlesh, who on a recent rainy day was carrying one of Rohini’s sisters, a toddler with a cloudy eye and a disturbingly quiet demeanor.

“We don’t have the money to send the kids to school,” Kamlesh said simply.

India’s inability to pull Kamlesh and hundreds of millions of others out of desperate poverty despite decades of robust economic growth has been one of history’s great governance failures and economic mysteries.

Does India simply need more time for growth to work its magic, or is there something fundamentally wrong with its formula? Do improvements in health and literacy create growth or simply derive from it? And would India’s people have better lives if the government focused on improving workers’ skills or on bettering investors’ opportunities?