Page 306 - DSOC201_SOCIAL_STRUCTURE_AND_SOCIAL_CHANGE_ENGLISH

Unit 14: Social Change in Contemporary India

with numerous sociological problems. It has created dangers of greater fluctuation in land values, Notes
greater price-spreads of food articles, greater money illusions, and greater proportion of expenditure
on non-food items. Besides these dangers, the introduction of money economy has meant atomisation
of individuals within the family and destruction of family relationships. Thus, the three processes
(industrialisation, commercialisation and monetisation) have generated numerous sociological
problems.

Economic Development, Planning and Social Change in India
The economic development in India after independence can truly be described as a revolutionary
change. If we compare the economic development in the British period with the one in the Nehru
period of about two decades, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi periods of about two decades, the
period of more than six years of V.P.Singh, Chandra Shekhar and Narasimha Rao’s governments,
about two years period of United Front governments, and about one year period of BJP-led government,
the truth behind the above statement becomes self-evident. The industrial sector was overwhelmingly
dominated by the British capital. A fragment of the industrial sector owned by Indians was managed
by the British agencies. In the agricultural economy, the cultivators were in the clutches of zamindars,
jagirdars and local moneylenders (sahukars). Savings and investments were very low. Technology
was of inferior level. There was no concept of regional balance through enforced backward area
development. Foreign capital was not available for building India. Low incomes lead to low savings,
which further lead to low investment, low growth, and once again to low incomes. The theory of
vicious circle of poverty and never-ending cycle quite fitted the economy of the colonial period.

The economic growth in the two centuries of the British colonial rule between 1757
and 1947 remained 1 per cent or even less—a rate of growth so pathetically low that
it reduced India to a mere supplier of raw materials and a gaping market for western
exports.

After independence, the task for the new government was two-fold: dismantling the colonial economy
and erecting in its place base for a modern, independent and self-reliant economic order. The blueprint
for the country’s modern economy and nationhood—the socialist pattern of society—was provided
by the Avadi session of Congress in 1955 (during the Nehru era) and by the Bangalore session in 1969
(during the Indira Gandhi era). There is no denying the fact that the Nehru model of socialism did
improve our economy in the four decades of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, though there is a
school which decries its (Nehru model’s) performance in comparison with the economic growth in
South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand and Taiwan. We have now millions of modern
industrial enterprises where there were once but a handful; we have a huge reservoir of technical and
entrepreneurial skills; we have big public projects like Bhilai and Rourkela as well as big dams like
Hirakud; we have the highest rate of savings in the developing world; we have growth rate of 5 per
cent per annum (in 1998-99); we have sustained growth in exports, a twenty-fold increase in the
deposits of Non-Resident Indians (NRIs); we have unparalleled credibility in international money
market; and we have dropped the percentage of population below the poverty-line (from 51 per cent
in 1972-73 to 36 per cent in 1997-98, as claimed by the government after accepting Lakdawala
Committee’s recommendations). In spite of all this development, it is also a fact that we are faced
with the problem of inflation and high debt. The balance of trade deficit is very high and the budget
deficit is in trillions.
The Narasimha Rao’s government discarded the socialist model in 1991-92 and launched a new
revamped model based on the philosophy of liberalisation, marketisation and privatisation (what is
now called Nehruvian capitalism), which the Congress government claimed gave a big boost to our
economic development. The then Congress government maintained that the essence of the new model
was that it combined trust in the state as well as the private entrepreneurs, and held unflinching faith

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