-Sixth Five –Year Plan

This is a virtual condemnation of the earlier five plans by Indian Gandhi, chairperson of the Sixth Plan panel. Three were formulated under Pandit Nehru and the remaining two under Indira Gandhi herself. Why then did she question three decades of Nehruvian socialism?

When Gandhi talked about ‘perspective’, or rather questioned the ‘perspective’, she was using a very mild term. The facts before her should have goaded her to denounce the existing notions of ‘development economics’ as totally unsuitable to the country’s requirements. She should have constituted an apex body to revise the economics syllabi in universities. But she did nothing of the sort. And as we are being dragged into the next millennium, economists and planners of this country are yet to condemn books and theories stitched by those ‘triple sacred threads’, which have ‘sustained’ India’s glorious intellectual life for ages.

Among the social sciences, economics is a discipline that values facts. Indian economists also consider the census commissioner’s findings the most credible source of information. I, therefore, present certain facts to gauge how far varna/caste factors act as principal determinants in development. According to the 1991 census report, there are 7.45 crore landless agricultural labourers in the country, of which 3.37 crore, or 45.23 per cent are Dalits.

That means while every fourth Indian is Dalit (SC/ST constitute 24.56 per cent of the population), almost every second landless agricultural labourer, too, belongs to the community. Had varna/caste factors not been key determinants, every fourth landless labourer should have been a Dalit. This only goes to suggest that when the Zamindari Abolition Act was passed in 1948, or when the first five-year plan of 1951 incorporated land reforms – which concretised into the ceiling legislation - the varna/caste factors were not taken into consideration. This was despite Dr Ambedhkar’s warning to the Constituent Assembly- and Pandit Nehru in particular - that “neither consolidation nor tenancy legislation can be of any help to the 60 million untouchables who are just landless labourers.” (Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Vol1, p 408)

Significantly, the First Plan, or any plan for that matter, was not formulated by politicians alone. Many top-ranking economists participated. For instance, members from India’s foremost economics think-tank, the Delhi School of Economics, were involved in the very first plan.

The census commissioner, while talking about sectors of economy - primary (agriculture), secondary (manufacturing), and tertiary (services) - says, “The most common use of the sectoral composition of the workforce is its utility as an index of economic development. Shifting workers away from primary into secondary and tertiary sectors generally occurs as economic development takes place.” This definition of the index of development is universally accepted in economics. But does it apply to the Indian people?

Look at the caste dynamics, which predetermines the workforce shift in consonance with the chaturvarna order. Of the total Dalit workforce, 23 per cent of SC and 9.92 per cent of ST have shifted away from primary to secondary and tertiary sectors, as against 37.38 per cent of non-Dalits. Why this huge difference? Further, are Dalits and non-Dalits, who have moved away from primary sectors, evenly placed in terms of material land cultural gains in the newer sectors? The answer can only be negative.

This clearly establishes that development theories applicable universally, even by Third World standards, have little or no relevance to India, where the individual is not free of varna/caste. Then why theories, developed in societies without caste-like divisions, taught in Indian universities? They are redundant, and yet they shape our development strategies.

Pick five top Indian economists and survey their books, papers or articles, and see if they have ever attempted to understand why development, howsoever limited, has excluded Dalits. Or, have they ever given a thought to the fact that caste divisions are fundamental obstacles to development. Take, for instance, the economics departments of Jawaharlal Nehru University or Delhi University and see how many doctoral dissertations are devoted to exploring the caste factor as an economic determinant. Polio is not the only problem we must eradicate. The very notion of knowledge – inherently defective, and cultivated by people of merit – is a larger, more fundamental problem. We must correct it if at all we wish for a dignified space in the global village of the new millennium.

(Courtesy: Dalit Diary: 1999-2003: Reflections on Apartheid)