Performance Of Planned Economic Development In India

INTRODUCTION:

Economic development and economic growth are though different processes but on account of being complimentary to each other and, in general, running simultaneously parallel to each other in an economy the terms are ingenuously used as synonymous in the theory of economic development. Since the emergence of welfare governments, uplift of life of the people and poverty eradication through economic development or growth has become the prime objective for the governments of almost all countries of the world. This made two issues – the prospects and the performance of economic development, the issues of every time discussion and debate during the period of economic development process in the world economies. In India, the discussion and debate are going on though over both the issues but emphasis is now being given rather to the prospects. As regards to the performance, the versions went on being changed as and when there became change of the political party governing at central or state level. Therefore, the statistics, especially the government sponsored statistics, regarding the performance became affected and rather manipulated to some extent whereby the reliability of conclusions drawn from these statistics involved various apprehensions. The semblance of differentials between the claimed and the observed performances made a number of researchers draw their hands from analysing the performance and keep their analysing confined to the prospects only. Therefore, instead of statistical analysis the present treatise rests but upon the network of arguments backed by naked eye facts and physical observations, to infer whether the track of planned economic development has been compatible and rather best fit to the heterogeneous distribution in the paradigm of imbalances in variegated economic variables in India.

 PERFORMANCE OF INDIA'S PLANNED ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT:

We started our planned economic development since 1951 having in our hands the experience, a wide literature of well proved strategies and variegated plans pertaining to, used by and created or formulated by the well developed western economies, apart from our available natural resources. We were over enthusiastic and over ambitious on account of having the ready and well proved weapons sought from the western world for combating the problem of development. Therefore, instead of starting from the very beginning and covering the whole path we, being enticed and allured by the surprisingly fascinating fruits of industrialization, started our efforts but having longed for being developed and grabbing fruits thereof in a haste. Thus we lost sequences in our development path and ignored agriculture that was the spine of our economy. We forgot that Agricultural development had contributed a lot in paving the way for economic development of US economy and the miraculous development of Japanese economy had opened eyes in the morning of agricultural development initiated with the break of the Mizi Revolution. Thereby our agricultural development lagged far behind the level required for feeding our industrialization up to the mark. Agriculture based small and cottage industries became shattered and the villages became ruined. This raised a huge bulk of unemployed people in the widely spread rural sector. The unemployed persons started migrating to the urban areas in search of job. The urban development and industrialization there had not sufficient level to absorb the whole migrating mass and to provide them employment and proper urban life facilities. Thus, instead of overall development, an unbalanced and unfair development of our economy became resulted therein. Consequently a wide spread general unemployment prevailed in both the rural and the urban areas (as per ECONOMIC APPRAISAL 2006-07, the estimated number of unemployed persons rose from 7.98 million in 1983 to 9.02 million in 1993-94, to 10.51 million in 1999-2000 and to 13.10 million in 2004-05. The unemployment situation in both the rural and the urban sectors became almost uncontrollable.

THE PERFORMANCE IN RURAL SECTOR:

In rural areas there emerged acute shortage of energetic workforce, service centers, infrastructure, intellectuals etc. This hampered the rural development whereby agricultural development and rural life remained slang lower. That is why, even having travelled a long path of planned economic development, the state of affairs of rural India still remains almost the same as it was before planning. There is a big gulf between urban and rural people regarding wealth, wage, education and income. Due to the general unemployment the condition of rural mass became more embarrassing than that of urban mass since the rural people had already been subsisting in privation. The fruits of the development programmes in rural sector were mostly grabbed by the social elites in villages. Therefore, the general rural mass, instead of observing their economic uplift, rather found them-selves lagging behind in the run of economic development. The village industries had to be liquidated. Rural artisans or handicraftsmen either became unemployed or had to migrate to urban cities or towns. The socio-cultural, cheap and sometimes free entertainment sources (like village dramas, swangs, street magicians, community chorus, community games, rural fairs, community festivals etc.) were snatched by costly media based means. Modern road and rail transport replaced the traditional transport. Rural weekly markets and village shopkeepers came to their end in the want of adequate demand. This resulted to a rapid increase in the cost of living of the rural people but their income remained far behind.

On account of the extension of highways, link roads, mobile phone service, the rural educated but unemployed youths, especially those dwelling in the areas adjoining to suburban areas, came in touch with the luxurious and sophisticated urban life. They became enticed and allured but that urban life was out of reach because of their low agricultural family income based on hard working. Therefore, they started breaking the harnesses of moral and ethics pertaining to the simplicity of their rural culture. The importance of moral and spiritual wealth became replaced by the importance of monetary wealth in their life whence they started turning stones to earn rapid and high income through illegal activities which paved the way for crime in rural sector.  

THE PERFORMANCE IN URBAN SECTOR:

As a result of the heavy rural-urban migration amushroom growth of slums came about fast which eventually turned into big slum spots in cities and towns within a no longer period of 20 or 25 years. This resulted to unchecked urban growth whereby both the urban growth and the urban life were hampered. In addition to this a considerable number of politically, socially and economically sound and effective elites emerged in cities and urban towns. These elites interfered in the formulation and execution of development plans, on one hand, and in the fixation of priorities, on the other. Thereby our development plans became urban oriented and concentrating on rich minority. Thus the poor majority and the rural economy became ignored. The government became politically weak. Therefore its priority became to please the rich minority so that it may run. To mitigate unemployment and poverty among the general mass it has to play pseudo role to remedy sometimes the rural and sometimes the urban mass alternately through various unsuccessful employment programmes and plans. Moreover, these slum dwellers came in touch with the culture, the luxury and the sophistication of urban life and thereby became so enticed and allured that they started breaking the harnesses pertaining to the simplicity of their rural background. The importance of moral and spiritual wealth became replaced by the importance of monetary wealth in their life. Therefore, they started turning stones to resemble and even to become part and partial of the urban rich and prosperous majority. Due to the unbalanced urban growth and big gulf in the income of the urban poor minority and the urban prosperous majority, it was a difficult and long time task on the basis of slowly increasing income by way of hard working. Therefore, they started thinking of the ways of rapid and high earnings. Thus the urban poor minority became money minded and started looking towards shortcuts involving illegal acts. This brought them in contact with the prosperous white collar criminal urban community whereby they got involved firstly in the activities of white collar crime as hired labour. Later on, some of them formed their own groups by hiring others and started other criminal activities too.

CAUSES OF THE STINGING SITUATION OF PERFORMANCE:

There have been three causes of this stinging situation. The first was our galloping along the development path instead of travelling along the true locus by creeping, walking and running as and when needed. The second cause refers to the distortion in the concept of development whereby some programmes and projects pertaining to the national economic development (such as extension of mobile telephone service, extension of highway network, heavy industrialization etc.) also have been mistakenly referred to as rural development programmes, apart from those solely related to rural development (like land reforms, extension of rural or agricultural credit, extension of canal irrigation, rural electrification etc.). Moreover, the terms rural development and urbanization also have been referred to as synonymous. The third cause was the rapid population growth which added a lot to make the unemployment situation a mammoth. India's population that was below half billion in 1960, crossed the figure of one billion in 2000. It is well proved that the family planning programme failed to instil among the general mass the spirit of ‘children by choice and not by chance'. The introduction of target free approach in 1996-97, the reduced thrust on family planning, the poor access to family planning services and the inadequate attention on need based methods of sterilization have been the causal factors of the inadequacy and insufficiency of family planning programme in controlling population growth. The prevailing family planning programme has been proved insufficient and incomplete even because the policy makers formulated  the ‘Family Planning Programme' without properly going in full details of how it can be easily accessible for and why a child is born by different communities in different areas of India.

DISCUSSION:

I don't intend to out rightly reject the achievements of India on economic front in about 60 years of its planned economic development. But, I can't help pointing out that it has lost a lot on social and cultural fronts. There is still widespread poverty with increasing gulf between rich and poor regarding wealth, education and income. The white collar and the general crime, both, have rapidly increased and are now heading their way even to the crime free rural areas. The cases of suicide have rapidly increased wherein suicide by poor students in higher education and poor farmers makes us rather vexed and is a matter of great concern. Moreover the courts have been increasingly stuffed with the cases of dowry, divorce, rape, incest, sex rackets and bribery. On the other hand serious imbalances in the economy have been created on economic front also. Imbalance between agricultural and industry, between urban and rural development, between necessary and luxurious commodity production, between saving and investment, between autonomous and induced investment and so on are the examples.

If India went on running on the same track of development and thereby the above referred economic imbalances went on being deepened, not only socio-cultural setup will become in an awful condition but the economic achievements also will ultimately be slashed and the net result of our so called a long journey on the development path will come to nothing because economic development is of no use and is rather harmful to a society if there is degradation, degeneration and deterioration at social and cultural front.

CONCLUSION:

Therefore, it is concluded on the basis of above discussion that Indian policy makers and researchers should take concern of not only the prospects but the performance also while fixing the priorities, selecting the programmes and deciding the strategies to formulate the development plans in future. The above said priority fixation, programme selection, strategy decision and plan formulation should be so performed that the upward trend of social and cultural deterioration as well as the economic imbalances may become downward and socio-cultural development also may be achieved simultaneously when the economic development is achieved. This will make the Indian economic development meaningful.

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