The Rents of Misdelivery A Case for Modernisation of Industrial Planning R K Hazari Industrial Growth in India: Stagnation since the Mid-Sixties by Isher Judge Ahluwalia; Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1985: pp xxii + 235, Rs 120. STUDIES in agricultural economics in India have been abundant as well as productive. That is not the only or major reason for the success of the green revolution but it has helped. Industrial economics has been sadly neglected: those who know the facts do not or cannot conceptualise and write; those who can study, generally, do not care to feel the knots in the rope. Agriculture, it is true, is subject to the ravages of nature but, cultivation of opium and release of canal water excepted, each link in its chain of activity does not require sustained government intervention. Industry is more autonomous of nature but less immune against the interests and whims of a broad spectrum of the human species, ranging from owners, managers, traders and workmen to regulators and tax gatherers, some of them benevolent microbes, others fractious pests. One of the great virtues of capitalism, "the greatest revolution in the history of mankind", was to sweep away the feudal and mercantilist restrictions on the mobility of persons and goods and to substitute expanding horizons in place of narrow minds and markets and official policies. That the expanding horizons would benefit some, more than others, was inevitable, so came wars, deeper internal conflicts (or "contradictions'')
