India

Abstract

NATIONAL LEADERS often have a way of summing up concepts of political philosophy which are revealing in a way they do not intend. One of analogies that Jawaharlal Nehru was fond of retailing to unsophisticated audiences on his speech-making tours of India was his assertion that giant government-owned industrial projects his regime had set out to build were the temples of future. How right he was to compare them to India's massive religious structures of past! In truth, they have not contributed much more than ancient edifices to economic well-being of his people. Today, 30 years after independence, average Indian finds himself no richer-and perhaps actually poorer-than his father. And in no small part, abysmal poverty that continues to dog Indian is result of utterly ill-conceived economic policies of Nehru period. What Nehru set out to do was to construct a modernized heavy industry sector which would-in words of one of its sponsors, Professor P. C. Mahalanobhis-eventually come back and sweep up masses and deliver them from their eons of poverty. It was, Nehru's advisors told him (and they included a small clutch of Stalinist economists lent by Soviet Union and Communist states of Eastern Europe), simply a matter of tying Indian resources and raw materials to a system of Soviet-style planning. Today, almost all informed quarters in India understand that this approach, which that marvelous old statesman from Madras, C. Rajagopalachari, called permit-license raj, has reached a dead end. Now question is quietly posed on all sides, Where to go from here?