Articles by Pranab Bardhan

Results of a Survey in West Bengal, 1981-82 Pranab Bardhan Ashok Rudra The boundaries of the village labour market in an agrarian economy are often rather narrowly delimited and heavily dependent on social and territorial affinities. Even where there is a fairly rigorous market for agricultural labour, particularly for seasonal operations, the operation of this market sometimes does not extend very strongly beyond the cor\fines of the village or beyond some local neighbourhoods. This paper reports the results of a survey of five clusters of neighbouring villages carried out in West Bengal in 1981-82. The authors find some significant, though varying, evidence of territorial segmentation of the rural labour market and of limited labour mobility even within adjacent territories.

Some Observations on Economic Growth in India Pranab Bardhan IN a recent contribution, K N Raj (1984) has made a number of critical comments on,the proceedingr-of the 1983 SSRC conference on the Political Economy of Slow Industrial Growth in India, as summarised in a paper by A Varshny (1984). He has even offered an explanation of the deficiencies of the participants in terms of the fact "that the majority of the participants in the tonference are located abroad and therefore not sufficiently familiar with the wide variety of Indian data and their complexities". As a participant in this conference I find it unfortunate that Raj decided to make detailed comments on the conference only on the basis of an individual's published summary report without bothering to check at what leve of complexity and details the issues were actually discussed. As a result some of his comments are derived purely from misinformed guesses about what went on at the conference. On some, other issues there can obviously be differences of opinion (as.there was plenty of in the conference itself) between him and others, but lack of familiarity with the complexity of Indian data is not the basis of such differences. As a matter of fact some of the participants in the conference discussed Indian data at a much more detailed and disaggregated level than Raj with his superior access and familiarity has presented in the tables in his comment. I shall now briefly touch on some of the substantive issues raised by Raj. Needless to say, it represents only my personal views and I do not want to implicate the other participants. (1) Raj spends some space in trying to demolish the alleged hypothesis of deceleration in the rate of growth of gross domestic product. As the title Of the conference (as well as that and the contents of the paper by Varshney) should have made it clear, this is not what the conference discussed. The focus of the conference was on slow industrial growth. On the basis of disaggregated national accounts data for value added at constant 1970-71 prices for about thirty years, some of the participants showed a statistically significant deceleration in the annual rate of growth in the registered manufacturing sector between the first and the second half of this period. For example, fitting a semi-logarithmic growth equation, this estimated rate fell from about seven per cent in the period from 1956-57 to 1965-66 to about five per cent in the period from 1966-67 to 1981-82. For details see I Ahluwalia (1983) and Bardhan (1984), (This, by the way, is a less unsatisfactory way of analysing the data than dealing with the year-to-year growth rates that Raj presents.) Apart from deceleration in industrial growth rate, the participants in the conference also discussed in some details the relative slowness of the growth rate itself compared to that in some other developing countries and compared to the potential India has.

A Break-through in Marxian Economic Theory Pranab Bardhan A General Theory of Exploitation and Class by John Roemer; Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982, A WELL-KNOWN economist, who is not easily given to praise, told me last year that he had served as a pre- publication referee for Harvard University Press for this book and that in his judgment this was the best work in Marxian economics in the last fifty years or so. Clearly this was in part a comment on the relative stagnation in Marxian economic theory in many years (let alone the sorry spectacle of cliches and shibboleths that pass for Marxian economics in many circle'). But there is no doubt that this book will remain an important landmark in any further development in the Marxian conceptual framework of exploitation and class. After a brief exposition of the main ideas in the book I shall offer some general critical comments.

Little Girls and Death in India Pranab Bardhan The Endangered Sex: Neglect of Female Children in Rural North India by Barbara D Miller; Cornell University Tress, Ithaca and

Types of Labour Attachment in Agriculture Results of a Survey in West Bengal, 1979 Pranab Bardhan Ashok Rudra THE First (1950-51) and the Second (1956-57) Agricultural Labour Enquiry in India classified all agricultural labourers into two categories: attached and casual. In a rather devastating critique of the concepts used in the First Enquiry, Daniel Thorner (1956) noted that the terms 'attached' and 'casual', as interpreted by the designers of the Enquiry, proved in practice to be "mutually nonexclusive catch-alls for non-homogeneous groups", and what was worse, the specific content and meaning of these two terms were left sufficiently vague as to allow arbitrary and conflicting interpretations by different field investigators in different areas. Raj (1962) reiterated similar criticisms of those two terms as used in the Second Enquiry, Faced with these criticisms, the statistical bureaucracy reacted in a characteristic fashion: they dropped the casual/attach- ed classification altogether in subsequent Enquiries.