Bhole, L. M.

Collected Papers on Gandhian Thought, Collected Papers, Vol. 3

Excerpt (Introduction, p. 1) If one ruminates over the question, what India has tried to achieve during the Twentieth Century, one finds that while her aim during the first half of the Century was Political Independence, it was Development during the second half. Whereas there was no ambiguity about the meaning and content of the first goal, there has been no such unambiguity about the meaning and content of the second goal, and about the method or strategy to achieve it. When India launched her “Development Enterprise” in 1951, “there was a legacy of pre-independence debate on India ’s development problems. This debate centered around the Gandhian approach, at one pole, and the ‘modernizing approach’ of Nehru at the other. The Gandhian approach has never been seriously discussed by either mainstream economists or by its left-wing critics ... both have largely accepted a ‘commodity centered’ approach. Thus, ... more goods are preferred to less; and a higher level of capital stock per worker has been considered unambiguously helpful in improving the standard of living” (Chakravarty, 1987, p.7). In other words, India embraced the Western Model of Development for rebuilding the Nation, and as a part of it, she has evolved a mixed economic system, with greater emphasis on Central planning till about 1985, and on progressively greater marketization thereafter.