THE RECOVERY OF NEHRU ERA

The period 1950 to 1964 is called Nehru era. The study on relationship between the
policy Regime and economic growth in India over this period suggest that the economic
policy of Nehru Era was relatively free of narrow political consideration.
After the Nehru era, within the same overall Framework much of the intervention was
mainly aimed at maintaining the political power of a ruling dispensation.

NEHRU MAHALANOBIS STRATEGY

At the time of the formulation of the second five year plan, professor PC mahalanobis
who was friend and advisor to late Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and who was one
time member of Planning Commission come prepared of growth model with which he
showed that to achieve a rapid long-term rate of growth it would be essential to devote a
major part of the investment outlay to building of basic heavy industries.
The model was intended to provide the analytical Foundation for the project of raising
the level of income via industrialisation already deliberated upon in the national planning
committee of the Congress which was chaired by Nehru at the request of Subhash
Chandra Bose in his capacity as the short lived party president. For this reason it is often
termed to as the Nehru mahalanobis strategy this was a model. To serve the end of
rapidly raising the level of income through accelerating growth, as raising the level of
income was considered the means to eliminating poverty.
Mahalanobis had conceived of an economy with two sectors, each producing capital and
consumer goods, respectively. being the model of a closed economy without
government, their output would the sum up to GDP or national income. in an interesting
departure from the economic theory of the time, capital was not subjected to diminishing
Returns.
This implies that a greater initial allocation of investment to the production of capital
goods would leave the economy with the higher stock of the same in the future.
Given the output capital ratio in capital goods sector, he proves that if the proportion of
total investment allocated to the capital goods is relatively greater, the rate of growth of
output of capital goods will be greater and hence, given the mahalanobis assumption,
the future rate of growth of investment in the economy will be greater.
Now, the greater the rate of investment, the greater will be the long-term rate of growth.
Mahalanobis shows that the proportion of total investment resources allocated to the
capital goods industries for each year is the most important factor determining the
long-term rate of growth of national income.

THE HEAVY GOODS SECTOR

Heavy good sector can be described as machine building complexes with a large
capacity for the manufacture of machinery to produce Steel, fertilizers, chemicals,
electricity, transport equipment, except the means of bringing about a fast growing heavy
good sector was to invest disproportionately in these machine building complexes.
 As the sector was characterized by long gestation lags in the production of output the
rate of growth inherent in the mahalanobis model would be lower in the short run than
that which would result from a strategy of investing disproportionately in consumer goods
production. however, the long run rate of growth resulting from the mahalanobis strategy
of shifting the investment allocation towards heavy good would be higher, even for the
consumer goods sector, as it enhances productive capacity across the economy.
It has been castigated as having been based on ideology. this criticism begins to make
sense only when one is told that the model had been inspired by the feldman model from
the Soviet planning literature even though mahalanobis has stated that he was not
aware of the work of Feldman at the time of formulation of his own model.
In 1950's, newly independent countries with ambition could hardly have been faulted for
Aspiring to what the soviets had achieved, namely Rapid industrialisation and the
consequent increase in income within a remarkably quicktime. It is not as if the entire be
compromised politics of the stalin regime, even without the gulag and the genocides,
was overlooked.
Nehru was clear that India would avoid them at the cost of aiming at a lower rate of
growth. It was clear that neither forced collectivisation as a route to raising the
agricultural rate of growth or the suspension of democracy as a way of quelling dissent
on the chosen strategy were even conceivable to the Indian leadership. so a relevant
criticism of the strategy would only be of its economic logic and what it leaves out rather
than of its provenance.

SUPPLY SIDE MODEL

There was a flaw in the model that is indeed related to where it has originated but this is
far from having been constituted by ideology. The mahalanobis model was exclusively a
supply side model. There was no recognition of a possible demand constraint to Capital
accumulation and little scope for slackening demand growth to subvert the growth
process.
A model based on the purely physical relationship between inputs and outputs made
sense in the Soviet Union, the classical command economy where investment can be
declared by planners and and forced by commissars.
In the command economy the surplus could be constantly reinvested irrespective of
market signals, thus maintaining a more or less constant growth dynamic at least for
sometime in the language of growth economics the savings are always invested.
The only constraint to a seemingly endless growth in a command economy would be a
declining investible surplus, which of course could also arise for entirely non economic
reasons such as political disaffection.
Something of the sort perhaps describes the decline and fall of the Soviet economy after
about 5 decades of rapid growth however, even as late as the 1960 there was no inkling
of any impending collapse.

WAGE GOODS
Centerpiece of the Vakil Brahmananda plan was a wage good sector
 As recaptured by Brahmananda, Keynesian unemployment assumes excess capacity
including stocks of wage goods and other circulating capital while in India unemployment
of labour exist because supply of labour wage goods to sustain labour as a corporate
factor with land and labour is inadequate.
Brahmananda named the wage goods are corn and clothing
For Vakil and Brahmananda the multiplier mechanism cannot work in the absence of
wage goods, and this let them to the proposition that employment cannot expand without
wage goods .for these reasons, Agricultural Development becomes fundamental.
an observation quiet relevant for India 50 years later - the service and industry sectors
cannot absorb more than a small proportion of the labour force. the service sector is
important but services can be expanded only with growing wage good surpluses.

APPRAISAL OF VAKIL BRAHMANANDA PLAN

In focusing on unemployment they had honed in on a ki reality of India in the 1950 also
the centrality accorded to agriculture could not have been faulted. however the authors
of this plan appear to have underestimated the importance of capital goods for raising
agricultural production
The much vaunted Sterling balances had been built up during the war when India has
supplied the allied effort in a virtual seller's world market. these goods being minor
armaments, clothing and equipment would no longer have been demanded to anything
like the same extent after the war. as for the agriculture sector, the primary source of
wage goods, it had been unable to supply even the domestic population adequately
during the first 50 years of the 20th century.
The egregious absence in the wage goods led model is The Economist's dues ex
machine, the engine of growth. some of this is evident in Brahmanandas assertion
that if the system is expanding and you have a supply of food, people could stay in their
homes and produce which goods. we can see that the Vakil Brahmananda model was
classical more than just in its terminology with employment determined in the labour
market.
There is no autonomous investment function, which would imply that the demand for
labour as a derived demand gets determined in the goods market- independent of its
price and in the context of their framework, independent of whether there is an adequate
supply of wage goods.
Prices Would Still rise in the absence of wage goods and this would hold back the
multiplier mechanism. however as the unemployed is surviving as it is, it is possible to
exaggerate the degree to which the expansion in output is curtailed following the
expansion in aggregate demand.
Symmetry between the mahalanobis and the wage goods model the former downplayed
the importance of capital goods and the latter down plates the importance of consumer
goods
In the mahalanobis two sector model per se the absence of consumer goods cannot
constrain output growth however once the overall mahalanobis strategy is taken into
account, it's oversight of a crucial ingredient for growth of the Indian economy namely
 consumer goods is arguably less than that of what have been projected as a rival the
underestimation of the importance of capital goods by vakil and Brahmananda.
Critics of Indian economic policy in the 1950s who saw the mahalanobis plan as violative
of economic freedom due to its Reliance on controls are unlikely to have taken much
comfort from the Vakil Brahmananda plan as its author had placed it squarely in the field
of planning.

LINK BETWEEN AGRICULTURE AND INDUSTRY

Not only was mahalanobis acutely aware of its role in the scheme of things but he had
incorporated this awareness into his strategy, if not so fully in his model. He had instantly
recognised that in the 1950 Indian agricultural growth was severely constrained by the
availability of the most basic kind of industrial inputs. Thus agricultural growth was itself
linked to industrialisation.

INCREASE IN INCOME LEVELS

A rapid increase in the level of income was the objective and this was to be brought
about by a great investment in heavy industries. this was Central to the plan for the
transformation of Indian agriculture, a process that would require increased industrial
inputs.
The planners were fully aware that the step up in investment envisaged in the second
five year plan was very substantial.
In retrospect, they appear to have had a better sense of the role of resources in a
credible economic plan than is found in the public discourse on growth today.
2 elements of the plan to raise the level of income
a. No major foreign assistance was envisaged. This was in keeping with the idea of
an independent development, a project incompatible with excessive Reliance on
foreign aid or, even foreign direct investment. Taking the second plan as a case
for an assistance was put down at less than 5% of total public expenditure in the
proposed plan budget for 1956-57 to 1960-61 even has the investment rate was
to be raised by over 50% from 7% to 11% of GDP.
b. The envisaged contribution of the public enterprise was significant revealing the
Indian states understanding of the role in the economy. The item additional
taxes and loans and profits from state Enterprises along with the contribution
from the Railways together equalled loans from the public and were over twice
what was to be taken as foreign assistance.

ECONOMIC GROWTH IN THE INDIA OF THE NEHRU ERA

A record of growth in the Nehru era

Two sets of comparators are used to evaluate the growth performance of an economy
one is the record of preceding growth in the economy itself the other is the
 contemporaneous growth of other economist similarly place and the growth of leading
Economics at early stages of their own growth.
In table 1 growth rates overtime of the three main sectors of Indian economy are shown.
In column 1 the data for the years 1900 to 47 are shown. In column to the data on the
same indicators for the rest of the 20th century including the 17 years of Jawaharlal
Nehru's Prime Minister ship is shown. In columns be the same indicators for the period
1950 to 1964 the year of Nehru's death, is shown.
The data conveys two important points:
Not only does growth in the Nehru years amply exceed what was attained in the
first half century of Colonial rule, but the quickening of the economy observed in
the second half of the 20th century may be seen to have been already achieved
in the Nehru era
Not only is there an acceleration of growth across all sectors but also the ranking
of sectors by growth is reversed early with the commodity producing sectors now
growing faster than services which had been the fastest growing segment of the
colonial economy.

Drawing parallels: industrial revolution

Joel Mokyr, a historian of Technology has observed that growth after the industrial
revolution was not just higher but qualitatively different in at least three different respects
from what had gone before.
Growth ceased to be a niche phenomena. Before 1750 it had been limited to
relatively small areas or specific sectors.
While pre 1750 growth had seen institutional change in the widest sense
technological change though not absent was far too slow and localised compare
to the role it was to play afterwards.
Pre modern growth was vulnerable to set backs and shocks both manmade and
natural that made doubtful its sustainability.
Not all three observation are evident from the data, the Nehru years witnessed
widespread growth across the economy, a technological advance was fostered and the
growth in income has not only been sustained for over 50 years but the growth rate itself
has actually been hasteningg slowly. However 2 of mokyrs comments on the
significance of the industrial revolution appear to have been tailor made for the period.
In response to the observation that the growth achieved in the early stage of the
revolution was not that much he has responded that the change must not be
seen as one of mere degree. there is qualitative difference between an economy
in which GDP per capita grows at 1.5% and one in which it grows at 0.2%
While a difference in the nehru era was distinctly Indian in that it was not
dependent on either foreign trade or foreign aid it certainly was not all that
industrial. while the categories for which growth is recorded in table 1 are
somewhat broad the data reveal that growth acceleration in the primary sector,
 largely comprising agriculture had exceeded that of the secondary sector more or
less synonymous with industry.

Growth comparison

The second of the 2 comparators of the growth performance of an economy is the

performance of other economies. 2 sets of economics have been chosen in the given
table.
The first is a set of asian economies. These were more or less on par with india in terms
of per capital income in 1950. 2nd is a set of the world's best performing economics of all
time. in table 2 growth rate attained by these 2 asian economies are presented.
of the two sets of economics for which date are presented, a comparison of india's
performance with that of the asian economics is of greater interest for two reasons
a. the data are for the same period and
b. As stated in terms of per capita income korea and china had economies that
were more or less on par with india in 1950.

Though india has grown faster than most of africa during the last 5 decades it has
performed worse than east asia. Korean growth rate is 50 percent higher than india's for
1950-64. However india's growth rate is 25% higher than that of china. china was to pull
ahead of india only a decade and a half beyond the nehru era, in the late 1970s and
following the reforms unleashed by Deng Xiao Ping.
In a comparison with china it now appears that nehru had not left the indian economy at
any great disadvantage. the subsequent tearing away of china, and the falling behind of
india in the growth league tables owe itself to causes other than his leadership.

Comparison with organisations for economic cooperation and development (OECD)

Table 2 shows a comparison of the growth in India during 1950 to 64 with long term
growth in OECD economies .we can see from table 2 that the former has exceeded the
latter often substantially.
Unexpected consequence of the transformation of the economy had been a very
significant rise (table 1) in the rate of growth of population. now the measured rate of
growth of per capita GDP is lowered .two observations are in order here
a. From table 1 we can see that were the rate of growth of population to remain at
the colonial Rate the rate of growth of per capita income during 1950-64 would
have exceeded 3%. this is more than twice the rate of growth of per capita
income of the US and UK during 1820 to 1992 and exceeds that attained by
Japan during the same period.The rise in the rate of growth of population per se
serves as an indicator for more vivid of the extent and nature of the economic
transformation than any estimated rise in the rate of growth. life expectancy at
birth Rose from no 32 years in the 1940s to 37 years in the1950s.
 b. The longer the time period, the greater the likelihood of observing a higher
growth rate for these economist when compared with the shorter series
commencing from a time when their per capita income was the same as that of
India's in say 1950. From an economic standpoint, initiating growth in the
presence of increasing returns to scale, a low base is actually a serious
impediment to growth, for the lower the scale of production the lower,
proportionately, is the surplus available for investment.

MISPERCEPTIONS REGARDING THE NEHRU MAHALANOBIS STRATEGY AND THE

OUTCOME OF THE POLICIES THAT HAD BEEN ADOPTED AS A CONSEQUENCE

The neglect of agriculture

There are two ways in which a sector can be neglected first it could be ignored in the policy
discourse itself, with sufficient attention devoted to its problems negligence would also take the
form of insufficient resources being devoted to the desired expansion of a sector.

VKRV Rao an Indian economist had had ringside view of the Indian economy for over 5
decades starting about 1950. he said that higher priority should be given to agriculture and
consumer Industries instead of to Capital good industries. the emphasis placed on capital goods
industries was the result of an understandable desire to furnish the country with domestic supply
of the crucial inputs of economic growth so that the rate of growth could be much faster.

he also said that it is not correct to suggest that planning under Nehru did not give sufficient
priority to agriculture in fact, of the total investment undertaken during the first three five year
plans agriculture, including irrigation, accounted for rs 3446 crore or 22.7%while economic
infrastructure like transport and communication and power accounted for rs 5737 crore or 37.7%
and social services for rs 2760 crore or 18.1%. industry accounted for only rs 2651 crore or
17.2% of investment in the public sector during the 15 years covered by the three plans.

Raj Krishna was an economist in a very different mould from vkrv Rao. He suggest that there
may have been mistakes only in the proportions in which investment had flowed into different
channels rather than in the choice of the plural strategy which had always characterized Indian
planning. He also said that nearly a fifth of the public sector plan outlay has been consistently
allocated to Agricultural Development.

there was a massive increase in the flow of credit to the agriculture sector from Rs 70 crore in
1950-51 to rupees 2000 crore in 1975-76. almost all agricultural inputs are subsidised,
agricultural income is lightly taxed, and during the last 13 years minimum prices covering the full
cost of production has been guaranteed for all major crops.

In per capita terms the director location to agriculture was certainly lower than that to industry as
the rural population dwarfed every other cohort in the economy. Planned industrialisation was
hardly a rival to Agricultural expansion as mahalanobis had seen it. On the contrary, faster
agricultural growth it was diagnosed needed more industrial inputs, whether fertilizer for nutrient
replacement, iron and steel for implements or cement for irrigation conduits.

Table 1 shows unambiguously that the agricultural sector grew very impressively under Nehru
recording the highest growth among all sectors and making a dramatic recovery from the
colonial era. For a century and a half, ending with the Bengal famine of 1943, there has been
some devastating famine in India with one particular famine in Bengal under the East India
company in the 18th century wiping out an estimated one third of the population. these famines
were directly related to the policies of extortionate taxation and forced commercialisation of
agriculture pursued by the company.

Data in table 3 presents us within unedifying picture of Indian agriculture under the Raj. first, the
rate of growth of food grains as a whole is far lower than the rate of growth of population
implying declining availability. the output of rice, the grain consumed by the largest number in
India then and now actually declines. the record of non food grains is better with a far greater
average growth rate in the aggregate.

this reflects precisely the nature of the colonial project which was the exploitation of the natural
resources and command during the market of the colony for the benefit of Metropolitan industry.
indeed the glacial progress of food grains production is directly related to this strategy,
implemented partly through price incentives and partly by brute force.

The public sector enterprise as a black hole

The second misperception of the policies of the Nehru Era pertains to the idea of the public
sector. in India today there is an unmistakable frustration with the public sector. it is associated
with a poor performance record ,resented for its lack of innovation, disdained for its contempt of
social responsibility and considered a draft on the public resources.

The belief among most that this outcome is intrinsic to the nehruvian conception of the public
sector is far from correct.

The Hallmark of any successful developmental effort is the mobilization of resources. It is not
necessary that the resources mobilized must be contained within the public sector. after all,
private investment is an equally legitimate component of aggregate investment in an economy.
however, in the context of Indian industrialization, launched in the 1950, a large part of this
mobilisation would necessarily have had to be in the public sector as it was intended that the
state would have the leading role here. for planning to be effective, there is required, if not
concentration in its hand, at least an adequate fund base for the state. where an economy is at
a low income level the requirement is likely to be large, in turn requiring the productive surplus
to come progressively into the public sector thus enabling it to maintain command over
resources.
 RESOURCE MOBILIZATION
According to the recommendation for the second five year plan by the planning commission
1956 large financial resources would be required for the second plan. A small portion would
come from Sterling balances or Foreign lawns and aid, and the bulk of the resources must be
found from within the economy. the tax system would be directed to collect an increasing part of
the growing National income in order to permit greater capital formation in the public sector and
to finance an expansion of social services.

The public sector would be extended to Industrial and commercial activities where necessary for
raising resources for public purposes. This is echoed in the industrial policy resolution of 1956
which states that public sector was expected to augment the revenues of the state and provide
resources for further development in freshfields. we find that the official idea of the public sector
was not welfarist. in particular the idea of public sector at all was to raise resources for public
purposes.

Apart from the replication of the views of the government on the role of public sector quoted
earlier two points may be noted. first the independent economist had recognise the serious
resource mobilization effort entailed in the plan to industrialise. secondary the complete
absence of populism in the recommendation that in the short run even the convention of
excluding essentials from taxation may have to be put in abeyance.

PERFORMANCE OF PUBLIC SECTOR

A surge in public investment had been achieved in the Nehru Era, a 15 year record of
expansion that has not been surpassed. The share of public savings in total savings had
risen by the end of the period.though the extent of this increase is not much greater than
that of the private corporate sector it is still noteworthy that the expansion of investment
was led by an expansion of public saving.
The public sector has been classified into the public authorities-comprising government
Administration and departmental commercial Enterprises-and the non departmental
enterprises- comprising Government companies and statutory corporations
From table 4 we can see that while the expansion of savings in the public sector as a
whole is as it is faster than the expansion in savings of the private corporate sector,
within the former the non departmental Enterprises Turn in a vastly superior performance
compared to all groups. Though the non departmental Enterprises continue to improve
steadily for the next 20 years or so, during no other phase is quite spectacular growth in
their savings during 1950 to 1964 matched.
3 caveats need to be introduced.
The rise in aggregate profits is not incompatible with instances of chronic loss
making by individual units
The data cannot serve as a measure of profitability for which purpose we would
need to factor in the volume of capital invested
 This is not to be taken as a mark of the efficiency of the public sector, as we are
almost certainly dealing with monopolies here.

referring to the losses made by public Enterprises, Jagdish Bhagwati stated, capital
intensive white elephants in the public sector were supported on the basis of models that
deduced that this choice of techniques would yield a higher savings rate and hence
higher growth. During the Nehru era the savings of the public Enterprises actually grew
faster than that of the private corporate sector.
Neither the official approach to them nor the actual record of the public Enterprises
during these years suggest that the public sector was one of the wasteful legacies of the
Nehru Era. there drift in this direction owes more to the pure politics of a subsequent era
when the public sector was turned into a vast machine for dispensing patronage and
buying out politically the vested interest of the day. the evidence presented here also
allow us to evaluate the assertion that 'dirigisme is recipe for a fiscal crisis of the state.
the growth of the central government's tax revenues as share of GDP in the 15 years
since 1950 had not been exceeded even by the Year 2000.

NEGLECT OF PRIMARY EDUCATION

The area that appears to have been neglected very severely the Nehru era is primary
education. Rare are the interventions from contemporary Indian Economicsts on the
relevance of primary education but there is a particularly Forcefull one by Krishnamurthy
an economist then with the Bombay School. in a note written in 1955 Krishnamurthy
wrote.. how absurdly Low are the sums allotted for education in the mahalanobis plan
speaking of it as being lopsided, with little importance given to education and other
social services and calling for a reallocation to expenditure on this account from the
outlay on heavy industries.
Krishnamurthy reasons for a greater expenditure on education and his explanation for
why it is so low : a concerned effort to educate the mass of the population, especially in
areas, would undoubtedly have far reaching benefits of a cumulative expansionist
character. this would greatly lighten the tasks of the government in bringing about Rapid
economic development. pointing to the governments lack of even-handedness in
dealing with education in comparison with heavy industries or river valley projects for
which it was willing to adopt deficit financing, his speculates whether this has to do with
the fact that being brought up in the traditions of mid Victorian finance it continues to
apply the calculus of the private grocery merchant to a matter like education.
It is of course technical true that, given the constitutional distribution of powers in India,
Education being a state subject was then at least partially a responsibility of the states,
but this does not absolve the policymaker of the Nehru era of a grave error of judgement
regarding the factors that drive growth, leave alone development.

CONCLUSIONS
The public policy of the Nehru Era had set in motion a more or less stagnant colonial
economy. A proliferating Bureaucracy, corruption, closedness to foreign capital and the
 constituent technological backwardness in production, the lack of competition and the
consequent shoddiness of the consumer goods, and unaccountable public sector and
the consequent low productivity came along.
After the death of Nehru was witnessed what has been described as a lurch to the left
characterized by increasing trade and industrial policy controls and at times reckless
expansion of public sector employment
Many of these policies were at a tangent from those of the Nehru era, notably the
deteriorating performance of the public sector and the use of public monies to buy out
economic is affection with subsidies. this came to be termed nehruvian socialism even
though the elimination of economic waste, unaccountable governance and inefficiency of
resource use for the very arguments for socialism in the first place and not just in India.
but, more to the point, no matter that all of it bore no resemblance to what had been
practiced in the Nehru era. its consequences were serious for India.as Chandra,
Mukherjee and Mukherjee have commented the controls, restrictions, interventions
were paradoxically often resorted to in the name of introducing socialist principles and
equity but actually ended up building a distorted, backward capitalism.

ACHIEVEMENTS OF NEHRU ERA

The Nehru Era witnessed the recovery of India and the igniting of a growth process that
has remained undimmed for over 5 decades during which time the economy has been
hastening slowly. The repeated acceleration of the growth rate implies that drawing a
likeness between the policies of the Nehru era and the Soviet Union is false as growth in
India has been sustained in a way that it was not in the former Soviet Union.
India's growth rate has accelerated and it may be suggested that this is not incompatible
with the Nehru mahalanobis strategy.
Two specific achievements of the Nehru Era : the quiet spectacular transformation of
agriculture as reflected in the acceleration of production and the unprecedented
mobilization of resources by the Indian state as reflected in the hike in public investment.
There has been errors of commission, such as the proliferation of an unregulated
economic Bureaucracy, and of omission, such as the gross neglect of primary education.
But there have been 4 decades after Nehru to correct these. to suggest that this is due
to a lock-in effect of nehruvian strategy and that nothing could have been done to alter
the situation is only to confirm that we have not understood the lessons of our recent
past.
Under Jawaharlal Nehru the Indian economy had been transformed from a colonial
Enclave to one with at least some of the prerequisites for sustained long term growth
while at the same time maintaining an autonomy from the superpowers vying for
influence on a newly independent subcontinent.
The rate of growth achieved in the Nehru years was indeed remarkable. The Framework
within which it had been achieved reflects upon today's thinking on the ideal economic
architecture for growth. Central to this purported ideal is the construct of economic
freedom, defined as absence of restraint.
 Considered economies since the implosion of the Soviet Union, this idea is sharply at
odds with the recent history of China where the longest ever recorded boom is occurring
in an environment that severely restricts freedom. While the situation in the Nehru Era
was a far cry from contemporary China both in terms of economic and political freedom,
the growth performance of that period engineered almost entirely by the state is a
serious challenge to the thinking on growth encapsulated in the Washington consensus
a recipe for prosperity highly influential in the 1990s but by now under challenge.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh RSS leader KS Sudarshan said- he hoped that
things would change after Indian Independence but that did not happen. Nehru was the
last Britisher to have ruled India, therefore nothing at all changed. while Sudarshans
concerns in the speech are mostly focused on culture, it does suggest that little changed
in India under Nehru.
Gurcharan das is nevertheless deeply concerned of the well being of his compatriots. he
has argued that Jawaharlal Nehru and his planners attempted an industrial revolution
through the agency of the state. They did not trust the private entrepreneurs, so they
made the state the entrepreneur. not surprisingly, they failed and India is still paying a
high price for their follies.