Indian industrial economy

Like many other underdeveloped countries of today, India has evolved from its pre-capitalist form into a mixed economy. On account of massive increase in population and relatively slowly growing employment opportunities, the problem of unemployment and underemployment continues to persist and, indeed, is assuming a more and more dangerous proportion. The programmes of large scale industrialization adopted by the government ever since the beginning of the Second Five Year Plan have helped the economy in coming out of the low-level equilibrium trap and have introduced many significant structural changes. However, a number of problems remain. The industrial sector was plagued by stagnation and retrogression for full two decades, 1965-85; the industrial licensing policy failed in achieving its objectives of regulating industrial investment and production according to plan priorities and targets, reducing concentration of wealth and economic power, ensuring regional dispersal of industries etc.; the public sector has failed to utilise its resources properly leading to substantial under-utilization of capacity and colossal wastage of resources etc. The policy of regulating the activities of the multinational corporations through the provisions of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act has been no more successful.

In the present book we aim at studying all the above problems and many other related issues. The book itself is divided into 25 chapters. The initial chapters are devoted to the discussion of the economic system and characteristics and problems of underdeveloped countries. We then turn to a discussion on the nature and structure of Indian economy, natural resources, population problem, occupational distribution of population and the problem of unemployment.