India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha
Mahalanobis took the task very seriously indeed. In the late summer of 1954, he set off for a long tour of Europe and North America. He had, he confessed, an ‘inferiority complex about economic matters’. This trip abroad was thus educational – to improve his own knowledge about the subject – but also frankly propagandist. By cultivating foreign economists, he hoped to bring their Indian counterparts around to his own point of view. As he told a friend, ‘at the back of everything is one single aim in my own mind – what effective help can we secure in making our own plans and in implementing them’.18
Mahalanobis first went to the United States of America, where he collected information on input–output coefficients, these maintained in a deck of 40,000 Hollerith punched cards. He talked to the man who had done the work (Wassily Leontief, a future Nobellaureate), before crossing the Atlantic to meet the dons of Cambridge. The ‘most brilliant’ of these was Joan Robinson, then just back from a trip to China (where she was ‘much impressed by the progress they are making’.) She thought that the export–import sector in India needed more government control. Mahalanobis agreed, and in turn asked Joan Robinson to visit India as a guest of the ISI. This, he told her, ‘might be of very great help to us because her support may carry conviction that our approach to Development planning is not foolish. She smiled and said – “Yes, I think I would be able to knock some sense into the heads of the economists in your country.”’
Mahalanobis now crossed the Channel, to converse with the French Marxists. Then it was time to shift to the other side of the Iron Curtain. He reached Moscow via Prague, and was at once impressed by the ‘amazing’ pace of construction work: buildings far bigger, and built much faster, than any he had ever seen. He had long talks with Soviet academicians, who said that if India wanted ‘to do any serious planning we must have the active help of, not scores, but hundreds of technologists and scientists and engineers’. Mahalanobis agreed, and invited them to visit his country, so urgently in need of ‘specialists and experts in the economics of planning’.19
These travels and talks finally bore fruit in a long paper presented to the Planning Commission in March 1954. Here Mahalanobis outlined eight objectives for the second five-year plan. The first of these was ‘to attain a rapid growth of the national economy by increasing the scope and importance of the public sector and in this way to advance to a socialistic pattern of society’; the second, ‘to develop basic heavy industries for the manufacture of producer goods to strengthen the foundation of economic independence’. Other (and we may presume lesser) objectives included the production of consumer goods by both the factory and household sector, the increasing of agricultural productivity and the provision of better housing, health and education facilities.
The emphasis on capital goods was justified in two principal ways. The first was that it would safeguard this former colony’s economic, and hence political, independence. The second was that it would help solve the pressing problem of unemployment. ‘Unemployment is chronic because of [the unavailability of] capital goods’, argued Mahalanobis; it occurs ‘only when means of production become idle’. The quickest way to create jobs was to build dams and factories.20
Mahalanobis’s draft plan was submitted to a panel of expert economists. With one exception, all endorsed the emphasis on capital goods and the role of the public sector. To be sure, there were a number of specific caveats. Some economists urged a greater complementarity of agricultural and industrial production; others worried about where the funds for the plan would come from. Increasing taxes would not by themselves suffice, while deficit financing might lead to high inflation.
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Table 10.1 – Sectoral outlays in the first two five-year plans
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Outlay in first plan Outlay in second plan
Sector Total* % Total* %
Agriculture and community development 372 16 530 11
Irrigation 395 17 420 9
Power 266 11 445 10
Industries and minerals 179 7 1075 24
Transport and communications 556 24 1300 28
Social services, housing, etc. 547 25 830 18
* * *
* In crores of rupees (1 crore = 10 million).
SOURCE: Compiled from A. H. Hanson, The Process of Planning: A Study of India’s Five-Year Plans, 1950–1964 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), table 7, p. 134.
But, on the whole, the leading economists of India were behind what was already being called ‘the Mahalanobis Model of Planning’.21
This model was, among other things, an evocation of the old nationalist model of swadeshi, or self-reliance. Once, Gandhian protesters had burnt foreign cloth to encourage the growth of indigenous textiles; now, Nehruvian technocrats would make their own steel and machine tools rather than buy them from outside. As the second plan argued, underdevelopment was ‘essentially a consequence of insufficient technological progress’.22 Self-reliance, from this perspective, became the index of development and progress. From soap to steel, cashew to cars, Indians would meet their material requirements by using Indian land, Indian labour, Indian materials and, above all, Indian technology.
Table 10.1 compares the sectoral outlays for the first and second plans. In proportional terms the sectors of power, transport and communications, and social services, retained broadly the same importance. The decisive shift was from agriculture to industry, this compounded by a decline in the importance of irrigation.
While the heavy industries would be owned by the state, there was still plenty of room for private enterprise. For in ‘an expanding economy the private sector would have an assured market’. Their main contribution would come in the form of consumer goods, these to be produced by units large as well as small.23
A government resolution of 1956 classified new industries into three categories. Class I would be the ‘exclusive responsibility of the state; these included atomic energy, defence-related industries, aircraft, iron and steel, electricity generation and transmission, heavy electricals, telephones, and coal and other key minerals. Class II would witness both public and private sector participation; here fell the lesser minerals, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, pulp and paper, and road transport. Class III consisted of all the remaining industries, to be undertaken ‘ordinarily through the initiative and enterprise of the private sector’.24
Would the Mahalanobis model succeed? Many Indians thought so, most Indians certainly hoped so. So did their sympathizers worldwide. Representative here are the views of J. B. S. Haldane, the great British biologist who was then planning to move to India and the ISI. When shown the draft plan by Mahalanobis, Haldane commented that
Even if one is pessimistic, and allows a 15 per cent chance of failure through interference by the United States (via Pakistan or otherwise), a 10 per cent chance of interference by the Soviet Union and China, a 20 per cent chance of interference with civil service traditionalism and political obstruction, and a 5 percent chance of interference by Hindu traditionalism, that leaves a 50 per cent chance for a success which will alter the whole history of the world for the better.25
III
If Mahalanobis was the chief technician of Indian planning, then Nehru was its chief missionary. The prime minister believed that, in the Indian context, planning was much more than rational economics. It was good politics as well. While the plan was based on the work of economists and statisticians, to realize its goal the ‘people must have the sensation of partnership in a mighty enterprise, of being fellow-travellers towards the next goal that they and we have set before us’. Popular participation was the only way to make ‘this Plan, which is enshrined in cold print, something living, vital and dynamic, which captures the imagination of our people’.26
Planning was thus a ‘mighty co-operative effort of all the people of India’. Nehru hoped that the new projects would be a solvent to dissolve the schisms of caste and religion, community and region. Introducing the first plan to his chief
On the economic side, Nehru singled out two activities as providing the ‘essential bases’ for planning: the production of power and the production of steel.28 At Independence, India had only two steel plants, both privately owned, which produced just over a million tones a year. This was inadequate for an expanding economy, more so one that had committed itself to the building of heavy industries.
The private sector was barred from starting new enterprises in steel, which, along with coal, shipbuilding, atomic energy and aircraft production, was deemed too important to be subject to the profit motive. The forest belt that runs across central India was rich in iron ore and coal, and it had plenty of rivers too. At once a lively competition began between the states that comprised this belt, each seeking to have the first public-sector steel plant with in its borders. This was paralleled by a competition between the industrialized countries of the West, each of whom wanted the contract to build the first plant.29
The second plan had set a target of 6 million tonnes of steel. The output was needed to provide inputs to other planned industries. But it was also a way of promoting forced savings. As one economist famously put it, ‘you can’t eat steel’. While the second plan was being finalized, the Indian government signed three separate agreements for the construction of steel plants. The Germans would build one in Rourkela in Orissa, the Russians one in Bhilai in Madhya Pradesh, the British one in Durgapur in West Bengal. The Americans, much to their sorrow, had lost out. That the war-ravaged countries of Europe had grabbed two contracts was bad enough, that their hated Cold War rivals had taken the third was worse. Years later an American friend remembered how the decision that Bhilai was going to the Russians was communicated over the radio in tones of palpable sadness by the fabled broadcaster Ed Murrow.30
The Russians, of course, were delighted. Nikita Khrushchev visited Bhilai and called it the ‘Magnitogorsk of India’. Pravda ran lavish photo features hailing Bhilai as a symbol of Indo-Soviet co-operation.31 The Indians were more enthusiastic still. A Bengali chemist who worked in Bhilai recalled how his Russian boss had, over the years, become an intimate friend as well. When the time came for the foreign expert to leave, the Indian could not contain his tears. The Russian was stoic, but his wife had sympathetic drops tricking down her cheeks. For the bereft Bengali, those tears ‘were nothing to me but the drops of the holy water of the Volga, which pervasively mingled with the stream of our Ganges, and inundated our fraternity and imperishable friendship’.
In Bhilai, Russian and Indian worked shoulder to shoulder, clearing the land, building the roads and houses, erecting the plant. Those who were part of this effort remembered it with warm affection. It was, recalled one participant, ‘a frenzy without panic, a tempo with a plan. The construction team glowed with pride and satisfaction at the newborn plant they had brought to life, the operation team was anxiously eager to nurture it to its full stature . . . Each of us were helping build the future – a future one could almost see, touch, and feel.’ Finally, in February 1959, under the benign eyes of the president of India, the first flush of molten iron came out of a blast furnace in Bhilai. All around there were tears of joy and rejoicing. Those who were there long remembered them as ‘the most exciting moments of [their] life’.32
The Indian steel industry was described by a senior official as ‘at once a school of technique and the mainspring of other industrial activities’.33 In fact it was more. The steel factory was a living refutation of the belief that Indians were non-productive and pre-scientific – in a word, backward.
IV
In the economic modernization of India, large dams occupied a rather special place. They would, on the one hand, emancipate agriculture from the tyranny of the monsoon and, on the other, provide the electric power to run the new industries mandated by the five-year plans. Jawaharlal Nehru was enchanted by dams, which he called ‘the temples of modern India’. His fascination was shared by millions of his country-men, who too came to venerate these towering new monuments built in mud and concrete.
Indian intellectuals greatly admired the Tennessee Valley Authority, the integrated project that was a cornerstone of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. But they also admired the massive multipurpose projects undertaken in the Soviet Union. In the 1940s, anticipating Independence, scientists and engineers made trips to America and Russia to acquaint themselves at first hand with how dams were built. They were deeply impressed with what they saw.34 On either side of the Iron Curtain, these projects represented ‘the triumph of science, technology, foresight and centralized government over politics, petty local authorities and powers, ignorance, superstition, and backwardness’. They represented, indeed, ‘the salvation of the nation through rationality and strength’.35
Like North America and Russia, the subcontinent had numerous large rivers. Damming and taming these rivers would kill three birds with one stone; generating electricity, providing water for irrigation and preventing flooding. After a particularly lethal bout of flooding on the Godavari in the monsoon of 1953, a leading engineer wrote to a leading politician that this was a river
with enormous potential for good. The destruction caused by floods of this year has, however, demonstrated that if these flood waters are not harnessed for beneficial use, they will constitute a potential threat to the well-being of the people. Properly conserved, these flood waters will satisfy all the needs of the Godavari basin and leave ample reserves, which integrated with the Krishna waters will enable irrigation and power benefits to be extended right down to Madras and further south . . . No effort should therefore be spared in harnessing of the Godavari waters, in optimum integration with the Krishna, nor extraneous reasons permitted to delay or jeopardise their consummation.36
Here was a proselytizing technocrat speaking to the already converted. For while the Godavari was still undammed, most of the other major rivers had already come under the hand of man. Among the massive dam projects under way were those on the Mahanadi, Rihand, Tungabhadra, Damodar and Sutlej rivers.
In the mid-1950s the political scientist Henry Hart wrote a lyrical account of the transformation of ‘New India’s Rivers’. For Hart, these projects were ‘the greatest of the monuments of free India’; to them ‘men and women come, in a pilgrimage growing season by season, to see for themselves the dams and canals and power stations’.
In the book, there is a particularly fine description of the construction of the Tungabhadra dam. When finished, the dam would embody 32 million cubic feet of masonry; these laid at the rate of 40,000 cubic feet a day, every day for five years. The sheer scale could properly be conveyed only by means of analogy. ‘Imagine the masonry in Tungabhadra Dam’, wrote Hart, ‘being laid as a highway, 20 feet wide, 6 inches thick. It would extend from Luck now to Calcutta, or from Bombay to Madras.’37
Without question the most prestigious of all these schemes was the Bhakra–Nangal project in northern India. Again, its scale is best narrated in numbers. At 680 feet, the Bhakra dam was the second highest in the world; only the Grand Coulee Dam, on the Colorado river, was higher. The concrete and masonry that would finally go into it was estimated at 500 million cubic feet, ‘more than twice the cubic contents of the seven great pyramids of Egypt’. The project would generate nearly a million kilowatts of electricity, while the water from the reservoir would irrigate 7.4 million acres of land, this carried in canals for whose excavation 30 million cubic yards of mud and ston
This project was a form of compensation for the refugee farmers from West Punjab, a substitute for the canal colonies they had left behind on the other side of the border. These peasants, predominantly Sikh, had ‘a martyr-like yearning to recreate within their own lifetimes the prosperity of which they have been cruelly deprived’. Bhakra-Nangal gave them ‘the field and the resources from which they can rebuild and resettle themselves’. In fact, it gave them more – for in addition to the water there was power, from which the Punjabis could, if they so chose, for the first time build an industrial future for themselves.
The Bhakra–Nangal project was described in minute detail in a special issue of the Indian Journal of Power and River Valley Development. The issue opened with a set off our most revealing photographs. The first showed the densely wooded site before work began – it carried the caption, ‘River Sutlej at Bhakra in its primeval splendour – the site as it was’. The second showed crane-like structures in the water and a low bridge slung across the gorge: this was ‘Exploratory drilling in river bed with drills mounted on pontoons – the first invasion’. The third photo, taken apparently in the dry season, showed hillsides by now quite bare, with trucks and bulldozers on the riverbed. Thus ‘Concreting of the Dam begins – man lays the foundation for changing nature’. In the last photo, the dam had begun to rise, aided by machines of a shape and size never before seen in India. This was ‘Excavation with heavy machines in progress in pit-area – the struggle with nature’.39
The men and women who worked at Bhakra were all Indian, with one exception. This was an American, Harvey Slocum. Slocum had little formal education; starting out as a labourer in a steel mill, he had risen to the position of construction superintendent on the Grand Coulee dam. Slocum joined the Bhakra team as chief engineer in 1952 and imprinted upon it his own distinctive style of working. Officers and workers of all levels were mandated to dress uniformly. Slocum himself was at the site at 8 a.m. sharp, staying there until late evening. A stern disciplinarian, he could not abide the sloth and inefficiency that was rampant around him. Once, when the telephone system broke down, he wrote to the prime minister informing him that ‘only God, not Slocum, could build the Bhakra Dam on schedule’.40