Poverty, planning and social transformation c.2
- Bombay Allied 1978
- 174 p.
THIS book makes a pathological diagnosis of mass poverty unlike the many recent works on the subject which describes the malady only in terms of its clinical symptoms. And the diagnosis is that poverty in our country is a deep-rooted structural disorder arising from the manner in which resources are owned and controlled, and the production patterns resulting from it. One of the main contributions of the book is its incisive analysis of the dynamics of development which, within the existing structure of the economy of private ownership and skewed distribution of the means of production and a regime of private accumulation, can only confer affluence on the few, unequally distributed, and privation and unemployment on the many, also unequally distributed. The author discusses why the usual numerical approach to growth and poverty hides these basic societal aspects of the process of development and demonstrates how the development efforts of the past, including the plans, have only reinforced the system's innate proclivity to enrich the few and impoverish the many. Hence it is argued that only a social transformation. that alters the structural characteristics of the economy, democratises and decentralises decision-making power, and ensures that the first charge on resources will be to meet the basic needs of all members of society, can solve the problem of mass poverty The book outlines the major contours of an alternative planning procedure to initiate that transformation. It presents a daringly different approach to the development process at this time of the search for new national alternatives.