Famines in India

The unemployed and under-employed in India are a burden on their families and relatives who mostly belong to the acutely poverty-ridden social groups. It appears that there is a certain kind of social fund which takes care of the unemployed but to which no contribution is made by the affluent sections of society. Social justice and equity demand that the responsibility for taking care of the un employed and under-employed from the poor families is assigned jointly to the government and the richer sections of the community. These ideas impelled me to write a small book on unemployment and employment policy in India.

The book seeks to study some aspects of unemployment problem in India. The first three chapters, introductory in character, outline the nature of the problem. Concepts and criteria of unemployment and relation between invest ment and employment are briefly discussed in these chap ters. An attempt is made to explain the central concept with the help of a macro-dynamic model of development with minimum unemployment. Here the paradox of a positive rate of economic growth associated with a positive rate of growth of unemployment is explained briefly.

The book also examines critically the specific program mes for promoting productive employment in the rural and urban areas. In this context, various constraints of a parti ally planned economy like India's are discussed in the book. The book emphasises that planning for employment would require planning the whole syndrome of investment, edu cation, technological change and composition of the output in the Indian economy. It seems that the realisation of the objective of full employment is possible only in a totally planned socialist system.