"Employment policy in a developing country: case - study of India V.2

The plan of the conference was that Indian experts, organised by the Indian Economic Association, would provide all the papers for the conference. The International Economic Association would send to the conference a group of foreign experts, with a background knowledge of India, who would take a major part in the discussion and criticism of the papers of the Indian experts. This was in fact the first time that such an intensive discussion of a single problem in a small conference, extending over more than a week, had ever taken place in India.

The result is a most important book, focused on all the different aspects of the problem. Volume 1 begins by trying to establish, with papers by P. R. Brahmananda and N. Rath, the dimensions of Indian underemployment a matter about which there is considerable dispute. It goes on, with papers by A. Vasudevan, C. Rangarajan, Uma Choudhury and others to look at the constraints on any policy of expansion and job creation arising from shortage of savings, of foreign exchange, of appropriate technologies, and other sources. There follows a section on the objectives of development, with papers by Gautam Mathur and V. M. Rao. A further group of papers deal with incentives for development; the writers include N. J. Jhaveri and M. Ahluwalia. The next group of papers, in Volume 2, describe and criticise the attempts of successive Five-Year Plans to deal with the problems of employment; authors include Brahmananda Prasad and D. T Lakdawala, himself largely responsible for the Draft Sixth Plan. A number of papers deal with the conflict of poverty and unemployment and whether the cure for one is the cure for the other.