India

POVERTY AND PLANNING IN INDIA

After visiting some sweatshops being operated by Bengalis in Londons
East End in July 1987 Prince Charles said that the poverty he had seen was
not too far removed from conditions on the Indian sub-continent. All we
are managing to do is replicate some of the conditions these people have
left behind ( Guardian, 2 July 1987 ). His observationillustrates a change
which is taking place in the discussion of the development of the First as
well as the Third World. It also marks growing acknowledgment of the
connections between poverty in the two places.

For a long time after the war the prevailing assumptions in Europe
were that commitments to economic growth, welfare institutions and the
political means of nationalself-determination were enough to eradicate
poverty at both ands of the spectrum. While it would be wrong to pretend
there was theoretical unanimity the liberal-democratic consensus
established during the war and immediate post-war years had proved to be
very powerful and produced a kind of naive optimism among a majority of
social scientists, administrators and politicians aboutfuture social
conditions . In today's transformed world many remain bewildered and find
it hard to get their bearings. One means of self-education is to trace changes
in the influence of the dominant theories in the social sciences.

Theory and International Conditions

During the 1970 and 1980s a long process of disillusion with the
achievements of the post-war welfarestate has been followed by a struggle
for ascendancy by advocates of contending theories. There are the theorists
of the New Right, who often turn out to be national zealots caugth up in
giving unwitting support to multinational forces whose effect is to seriously
weaken any national means of self-determinations. For them the obstacles to
growth and prosperity reside inworking-class institutions and
representation, state-owned services and production, bureaucratic inertia
and individual indiscipline. Remedies, they believe, lie in greater inequality
in the distribution of resources, privatisation of state-owned utilities,
elevation of the business class, promotion of the market and market
institutions, and greater state powers over trade unions, monoritiesand
perceived dissidents. During an unsettled period in Britain in the early
1980s we owed a lot to those like Stuart Hall, Robert Moore, Michael
Barratt Brown, Martin Loney, Nick Bosanquet and Meghnad Desai for
identifying and tracing strands in the ideology.

Then there are assorted groups of latter-day Keynesians and
Fabians, and Marxists, dependency theorists,feminists, and radical
economists and social policy analysts, many of whose prognoses seem at
times to be dated or fundamentally pessimistic. For them the obstacles to
the abolition of poverty and the achievement of social equality reside in the
institutions of capital and especially the privatte ownership of wealth, the
manipulations of a false democracy and the emphasis on self-centredinstead of collective values. Remedies lie in either the pursuit of a mixed
economy, with an as yet ill-defined role for the public sector, and the
restoration of social services in principle to their presumed former glories,
or the wholesale replacement of existing structures and institutions by
forms of social production and service, basic income for all, industrialdemocracy ans regional and local devolution of administration. Elsewhere I
have attempted to show how important it is to identify the recent history of
different schools of social scientific theory to help explain the strategies of
development being followed in different countries ( Townsend with
Corrigan and Kowarzik, 1987; Townsend, 1988) One author has illustrated
this theme in...