Indian economic development: retrospect and prospect

When three decades of planning failed to significantly affect the lives of those millions below the poverty line, it is time for introspection and critical review of the plan strategy. As late as the sixth plan, the Indian economy retains the features of a backward economy: stagnation in per capita income, mounting under employment and unemployment, acute inflation and a backward countryside, untouched by modernity.

The author, in this thoroughly revised and updated version, con tends that this woeful performance is largely due to the "strategic" failure to evolve a model of development, which aims at the solution of the pressing socio-economic problems, despite the precise articulation of well chosen objectives. In other words, a dismal failure to implement a well framed plan. The author also predicts some of the pit-falls. that await the planners in the future, and chalks out a new growth path for the eighties and nineties, in the form of a comprehensive development strategy both from the internal and external standpoint..