India After Gandhi (139 page)
Read India After Gandhi Online
Authors: Ramachandra Guha
Tags: #History, #Asia, #General, #General Fiction
10. T
HE
C
ONQUEST
OF
N
ATURE
| W. Burns, ed., Sons of the Soil: Studies of the Indian Cultivator, 2nd edn (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1944), introduction. | |
| Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, 1926–34: A Study in Imperfect Mobilization (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978); Peter Reeves, Landlords and Governments in Uttar Pradesh: A Study of their Relations until Zamindari Abolition (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991). | |
| Chitra Bhanu, ‘Food Situation Getting Worse in Malabar’, Swatantra, 29 July 1947. | |
| See, for illuminating contemporary analyses, Z. A. Ahmad, The Agrarian Problem in India: A General Survey (Allahabad: All-India Congress Committee, 1936); S. Y. Krishnaswami, Rural Problems in Madras (Madras: Government of Madras, 1947). Valuable surveys of the economic history of colonial India include V. B. Singh, ed., Economic History of India: 1857–1956 (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1965); Dharma Kumar, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2: c. 1757–c. 1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Tirthankar Ray, The Indian Economy, 1857–1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). | |
| See, inter alia, Dwijendra Tripathi, ed., Business and Politics in India: A Historical Perspective (Delhi: Manohar, 1991); Medha M. Kudaisya, The Life and Times of G. D. Birla (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). | |
| J. K. Galbraith, ‘Rival Economic Theories in India’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 36, no. 4, 1958, p. 591. | |
| See Meghnad Saha, ‘The Problem of Indian Rivers’ (1938) and ‘Technological Revolution in Industry – How the Russians Did It’ (1943), both in Santimay Chatterjee, ed., Collected Works of Meghnad Saha, vol. 2 (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1986). | |
| LajpatRai, The Evolution of Japan and Other Papers (Calcutta: Modern Review, 1922). | |
| K. T. Shah, ‘Principles of National Planning’, in Iqbal Singh and Raja Rao, eds, Whither India? (Baroda: Padmaja Publications, 1948). Shah was a Bombay economist who served as Secretary of the NPC. See also R. Chattopadhyay, ‘The Idea of Planning in India, 1930–1951’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Australian National University, Canberra, 1985. | |
| See, for example, National Planning Committee: Report oftheSub-Committeeon Power and Fuel (Bombay: Vora and Co., 1949). | |
| Memorandum Outlining a Plan of Economic Development for India (Parts One and Two) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1945), emphases added. The signatories to the Bombay Plan included G. D. Birla, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, Lala Shri Ram, J. R. D. Tata, and Purushottamdas Thakurdas. | |
| The intellectual climate of the time, as it pertained to economic policy, is captured in Tirthankar Ray, ‘Economic History and Modern India: Redefining the Link’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 16, no. 3, 2002; Nariaki Nakatozo, ‘The Transfer of Economic Power in India: Indian Big Business, the British Raj and Development Planning, 1930–1948’, in Mushirul Hasan and Nariaki Nakatozo, eds, The Unfinished Agenda: Nation-Building in South Asia (Delhi: Manohar, 2001); Pranab Bardhan, ‘A Note on Nehru as Economic Planner’, in Milton Israel, ed., Nehru and the Twentieth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). | |
| Speech in Lok Sabha on 15 December 1952, in Planning and Development: Speeches of Jawaharlal Nehru (1952–56) (New Delhi: Publications Division, n.d.), pp. 7–8. See also R. Ramadas, ‘Report on the Draft Five-Year Plan’, Swatantra, 1 December 1951. | |
| See Times of India, 4 November 1954. | |
| Cf. A. H. Hanson, The Process of Planning: A Study of India’s Five-Year Plans, 1950–1964 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 111–20. | |
| Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 83. Mahalanobis was an intimate of Rabindranath Tagore – it was said that he had a better knowledge of Tagore’s poems and plays than did the poet himself. | |
| See, for details, Ashok Rudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis: A Biography (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). | |
| This and the following two paragraphs draw upon Mahalanobis’s letters to Pitambar Pant, June–July 1954, Pitambar Pant Papers, NMML. See also Khilnani, Idea of India, pp. 83f. | |
| Mahalanobis wrote that he was ‘in favour of seeking the help of both USA and USSR (and of the UK and other countries) in developing the industrial production of India’ (letter of 7 July 1954, in Pitambar Pant Papers, NMML). He was in this respect genuinely non-partisan. In the years to come his ISI played host to top economists from both sides of the Iron Curtain – to men such as Simon Kuznets, Oskar Lange, Charles Bettelheim, Jan Tinbergen and many, many others. For details see Rudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, chapter 14. | |
| ‘Recommendations for the Formulation of the Second Five-Year Plan’, and ‘The Approach of Operational Research to Planning in India’, both written in 1955, both reprinted in P. K. Bose and M. Mukherjee, eds, P. C. Mahalanobis: Papers on Planning (Calcutta: Statistical Publishing Society, 1985). Along with these narrative papers, Mahalanobis also framed two mathematical models of economic growth. These are discussed in T. N. Srinivasan, ‘Professor Mahalanobis and Economics’, printed as chapter 11 in Rudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis. | |
| Hanson, Process of Planning, pp. 128–30. See also K. N. Raj, ‘Model-Making and the Second Plan’, Economic Weekly, 26 January 1956. | |
| Government of India, The Second Five-Year Plan (New Delhi: Planning Commission, 1956), p. 6. | |
| P. C. Mahalanobis, ‘Draft Plan Frame for the Second Five-Year Plan’, Economic Weekly, special issue, 18 June 1955. | |
| Hanson, Process of Planning, pp. 459–62. | |
| Haldane to Mahalanobis, 16 May 1955, quoted in S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 2: 194—1956 (London: Cape), pp. 305–6. | |
| Letter of 22 December 1952, in Jawaharlal Nehru, Letters to Chief Ministers, edited by G. Parthasarathi, 5 vols (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985–9) hereafter cited as LCM, vol. 3, pp. 205–7. | |
| Letter of 22 December 1952, LCM, vol. 3, p. 205; letter of 14 February 1956, LCM, vol. 4, p. 346. | |
| Letter of 13 January 1955, LCM, vol. 4, p. 123. | |
| ‘Triangular Contest for Steel Plant’, Economic Weekly, 19 December 1953; Taya Zinkin, Challenges in India (New York: Walker and Co., 1966), chapter 7. | |
| The friend was Joe Miller, the late and legendary librarian of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. | |
| See Subject File 5, K. P. S. Menon Papers, NMML. | |
| Ved Mehta, Portrait of India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), pp. 285–97. | |
| S. Bhoothalingam, ‘Rourkela Steel Plant’, Indian Review, April 1956. | |
| For example Meghnad Saha, My Experiences in Soviet Russia (Calcutta: publisher unknown, 1945); K. L. Rao, Cusecs and Candidates: Memoirs of an Engineer (New Delhi: Metropolitan, 1978). | |
| Daniel Klingensmith, ‘One Valley and a Thousand: America, India and the World in the Image of the Tennessee Valley Authority,1945–1970’, unpublished PhD thesis, Department of History, University of Chicago, 1999, p. 228. | |
| A. N. Khosla to C. Rajagopalachari, 30 August 1953, in Subject File124, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML. | |
| Henry C. Hart, New India’s Rivers (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1956), pp. 97–100. | |
| ‘India Marches on: Bhakra-Nangal Project’, MysIndia, 28 November 1954. Much smaller was the complementary Nangal project, a low concrete dam located eight miles downstream of the Bhakra. | |
| Indian Journal of Power and RiverValley Development, Bhakra–Nangal special issue, 1956. | |
| This portrait of Slocum is based on J. D. Sahi, Odd Man Out: Exploits of a Crazy Idealist (New Delhi: Gitanjai Publishing House, 1991), pp. 55–69,133; M. S. Randhawa, A History of Agriculture in India, vol. 4: 1947–1981 (New Delhi: Indian Council of Agricultural Research, 1986), pp. 92–3. | |
| Hart, New India’s Rivers, p. 225; report in the Current, 14 July 1954. | |
| Obaid Siddiqi, Science, Society, Government and Politics: Some Remarks on the Ideas of Jawaharlal Nehru, Zaheer Memorial Lecture, Indian Science Congress, Cochin, February 1990. | |
| See Shiv Visvanathan, Organizing for Science: The Making of an Industrial Research Laboratory (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985). | |
| On Bhabha see Robert S. Anderson, ‘Building Scientific Institutions in India: Saha and Bhabha’, Occasional Paper, Centre for Developing-Area Studies, McGill University, 1975. | |
| George Greenstein, ‘A Gentleman of the Old School: Homi Bhabha and the Development of Science in India’, American Scholar, vol. 61, no. 3, 1992, p. 417. | |
| Hindustan Times, 3 October 1952. TheCommunity Development programmes were inspired by, and to a great extent modelled upon, the work of Albert Mayer in eastern Uttar Pradesh in the late 1940s. See Alice Thorner, ‘Nehru, Albert Mayer, and Origins of Community Projects’, Economic and Political Weekly, 24 January 1981. | |
| S. C. Dube, India’s Changing Villages (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), pp. 157–63, 192–216 etc. | |
| T. S. Epstein, Economic Development and Social Change in South India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1962), esp. pp. 27–47. | |
| For details see B. H. Farmer, Agricultural Colonization in India Since Independence (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). | |
| See, inter alia, R.P.Masani, The Five Gifts (London: Collins, 1957); Hallam Tennyson, Saint on the March: The Story of Vinoba (London: Victor Gollancz, 1961); Geoffrey Ostergaard and Melville Currell, The Gentle Anarchists: AStudy of the Leaders of the Sarvodaya Movement for Non-violent Revolution in India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). There is a characteristically acid portrait of Bhave in V. S. Naipaul’s A Wounded Civilization (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). | |
| See Ronald J. Herring, Land to the Tiller: the Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in South Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); ‘Slow Pace of Land Reforms’, Economic Weekly, 30 May 1953; S. K. Dey, Power to the People? A Chronicle of India 1947–67 (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1969), pp. 232f. | |
| The climate of economic policy in the postwar world is usefully sketched in Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), chapters2 and 3. |
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