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Myth and Reality About Private Enterprise in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Ranjit Singh Bhambri
Ranjit Singh Bhambri
Affiliation:
University College of North Staffordshire in Keele, Staffordshire
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Extract

Widespread criticism and suspicion of the activities of businessmen have been a striking feature of public debate on economic and social affairs in India since 1947*. It has almost been a matter of habit with literate Indians to blame the commercial classes and the financial interests for the country's economic backwardness. In spite of the generous contribution of businessmen to the Congress Party funds, and the close association of Mahatma Gandhi with many prominent industrialists, the business community found itself under thick clouds of public hostility after independence.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , January 1960 , pp. 186 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1960

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References

* I am grateful to Miss Ruth Murphy, who read the first draft of this article and suggested numerous improvements in style.

1 Nehru, Jawaharlal, Independence and After: A Collection of the More Important Speeches, from September 1946 to May 1949, (Delhi), 1949, p. 189.Google Scholar

2 The Statesman (New Delhi), January 20, 1955.

3 Planning Commission, Government of India, Second Five Year Plan, [New Delhi], 1956, p. 24.Google Scholar

4 Rosen, George, Industrial Change in India, Glencoe, Ill., 1958, pp. 13–14.Google Scholar

5 Professor Ashton goes on: “They [the businessmen] were variously portrayed as ostentatiously rich or poor-spirited and mean; in either case they were far too much preoccupied with money. … It was an obvious duty to expose [them], and so, a generation or more ago, journalists and others, especially in me United States but also here [i.e., England], took with enmusiasm to what came to be known as muckraking. It was an easy way to public esteem and literary fame.” Business History (Liverpool), 1, No. 1 (December 1958), p. 1.

6 E.g., Lamb, Helen B., “The Indian Business Communities and the Evolution of an Industrialist Class,” Pacific Affairs, XXVIII, No. 2 (June 1955), pp. 101–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 I have talked with hundreds of small traders and shopkeepers (in North India) who seriously argue that honesty and success in business do not normally go together. Many of them strongly believe mat rich businessmen owe their wealdi eidier to good fortune or to greater dishonesty. Even some sophisticated Indians have suggested that wealdi cannot be accumulated by honest means. For an interesting example, see the anecdote from All India Congress Committee Economic Review, April 1, 1956, quoted in Meyers, C. A., Labour Problems in Industrialisation, New York, 1958CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 11.

8 In Hoselitz, Bert F., ed., The Progress of Underdeveloped Areas, Chicago, 1952, p. 18.Google Scholar

9 Sarkar, N. R., “My Days in the Federation,” Silver Jubilee Souvenir, Calcutta, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, 1953, p. 197.Google Scholar

10 Economic Weekly (Bombay), January 1956, p. 51; italics added.

11 Foreword to Rosen, , op.cit., p. XVGoogle Scholar; italics added.

12 Government control of private activity cannot, of course, be increased indefinitely without harmful effects on the volume of production. My point is that, so far, increasing government control and “government-generated uncertainty” have hardly affected the level of productive efficiency. If anydiing, these measures have helped to improve the performance of the private sector by creating the general feeling that private enterprise is on trial.

13 The following quotation from one of Mr. Nehru's speeches (delivered in the Lok Sabha, May 23, 1956) shows diat maximum economic growth is the guiding principle of the economic policy of the government. Replying to doctrinaire socialists who urged nationalization of all Indian industries, Mr Nehru, said: “The whole philosophy lying behind this Plan is to take advantage of every possible way of growth, and not, by doing somediing which fits into some doctrinaire meory, imagine we have grown because we have satisfied some textbook maxim of a hundred years ago.” Planning Commission, Government of India, The New India: Progress Through Democracy, New York, 1958, p. 52.Google Scholar