Indian economy 1947 - 92 v.2

In this, the second of a three-volume study on the Indian economy, the late V.M. Dandekar, one of India's most eminent economists, revised, up-dated and put together his entire writings on population, poverty and employment shortly before he passed away.

Professor Dandekar describes the evolution of India's population policies as protracted deliberations by numerous committees which have failed to reduce the birth rate sufficiently to compensate for the decline in the death rate. He attributes the low level of literacy to the disproportionately large resources being spent on higher education instead of on primary education, and concludes that the entire system has collapsed under the sheer burden of the numbers seeking higher education, resulting in an over-supply of 'unemployable' educated and an outflow of talent.

The section on poverty deals at length with the Agricultural Labour Enquiry (1950-51), which saw poverty and unemployment as two sides of the same phenomenon. Professor Dandekar suggests that once it was decided to anchor the poverty line on calorie consumption, the number of poor should have been estimated on the basis of the latest available consumer expenditure data. Reviewing the ongoing debate on the definition and measurement of the poor, he argues that it is attended by confusion between poverty and undernutrition.

In the section on employment, Professor Dandekar first gives us a brief account of Gandhi's thinking on employment and then reviews the propagation of khadi by the Khadi and Village Industries Commission. This programme, he maintains, exemplifies the problems involved in protecting a less labour-productive technology in the face of a more labour-productive one. The author rejects the notion of measuring unemployment and underemployment in terms of disposition of time and suggests that such an approach does not make much sense in a labour-surplus economy