Our Planning Commission is good, as good as the one I served for, with persons like Sukhomoy Chakravarti and the ones I served with, like Abid Hussain, Raja Chelliah and Hiten Bhaiyya. But jokes apart, the 11th Plan is a good document. Many of its chapters are technically good. But, sometimes they don?t hang together and there are no larger frameworks, with some numbers in different portions actually contradicting each other. Its production and some of its technicalities are outsourced and the novelty is attractive. Also there is an overarching ideology behind them which comes from the UPA and Sonia Gandhi?s National Advisory Council, which lends coherence. The section on agriculture and rural development is based on critiques of the mistakes of the 1990s and work done on them. These essentials must continue.
India and the world have gone through tumultuous times in the last two years. But we have protected ourselves from the worst ravages of the meltdown. The jury is still out on whether that was on account of momentum or strategy, with some like this column arguing that quicker, more coherent responses could have been possible. It will be a mistake though to believe that all that is required now is private research agencies to giving fact finding reports on sectors and regions.
This mindset comes from a strong ideological position that development planning as a strategy was wrong. Treatises by government economists denying the growth of the eighties (a decade, one said, was without ?vision? and so on), facile critiques of the National Planning Committee chaired by Nehru (to build up the case of alternate visions) are all interesting pieces of writing but have not been subjected to any serious professional scrutiny. None of these approaches, for example, were able to articulate the perception that India was growing fast from the 1980s. Apart from some Indian economists like Nagaraj, Sebastian Morris, Arvind Virmani and your columnist, this aspect was articulated largely by economists working outside India.
These economists working outside India were from the Brettenwoods institutions and had a largely coloured and jaundiced view of policy formulation in India. Alternately they reflected perceptions on India in their country of residence. For example some of the most severe critiques of India have emerged from liberal friends from the Democratic or Labour Party. Remember Selig Harrisson and the factual inaccuracies abundant in Francine Frankel. Okay, if you believe that good governance is an Anglo Saxon monopoly. A very astute Canadian friend recently startled me by saying that Indian film makers in his country, very critical of India were never a part of the critical social discourse there. Ditto for economists leaving aside honourable exceptions.
The upshot of the story is that there is a genuine need for a debate on development strategy for India. It is rubbish to say that those who want it do not see the merits of market-based reform. But strategic development policy approaches are on the agenda and in this column we will chip away at them. These relate, among others to making agriculture grow faster in an uncertain world, open economy macro strategies, technology policies for industry in a globalising world, organisational systems for public sector functioning and newer institutions with mixes of public and private initiatives, the South Asian region, and larger questions of energy and water. These policies need to be integrated with the questioning being raised on institutions all over the world. It?s not going to happen if the establishment in India is wedded as it is to its own grooves and its global friends now in disarray. The inability of any ranking Indian authority to comment intelligently on Obama?s America or the intellectual turmoil in Europe and the propensity of the Delhi intellectual establishment to stick to its earlier interlocutors is full of bathos. But pathetic as it is, it also stops us from reinventing our future, apart from reducing our influence in the region and the world. That has to change as we get out of another election.
The author is a former Union minister. Email: yalagh@gmail.com