Indian economy c.7

This book is intended primarily as an introduction to the problems of economic development in India. The information that is avail able to us is so vast that any reasonably detailed summary of it would have resulted in a book many hundred pages long. On balance, I have decided against writing such a book, choosing instead to present briefly such parts of the information as appear to me to be of the most critical importance. The student can read this book fairly quickly-although I am afraid that it has to be read with some care, because its arguments are sometimes rather involved-to obtain his general bearings. He can then pass on to the more specialized material that is documented in the biblio graphical references. Attempts to tell the story of Indian develop ment within the compass of a few pages raise problems of their own. One has to decide what to leave out and how the material that is included fits together. More important, one has to decide whether the developments are to be studied from the point of view of the experience of the economy as a whole or in the light of how those developments affect a particular part of society, such as the poor. The account that is presented is, therefore, a very personal view of Indian economic development in many ways. That personal point of view, I am fairly confident, can be defended both in terms of its analytical and empirical underpinnings. I have no pretensions to have offered any final resolutions of the many complicated problems that face us in the interpretation of recent economic phenomena in India. This book is no more than an exploratory essay, designed to raise certain questions in the reader's mind.