Articles by Rajiv Kumar

Food prices in the immediate future can be controlled only through large imports. Wheat stocks are adequate but rice stocks are not. There will be a fiscal cost because global prices are above domestic prices, but this will not be above 1 per cent of central government expenditure. This may be the best option since food inflation is now threatening to become generalised.

The nationalisation of the Indian coal industry was neither a well-planned nor a conscious socialist act of government policy. It was at best an act of crisis management. It was forced on the government by an industrial collapse resulting largely from government policies themselves. Post-nationalisation industrial development can hardly be said to have justified the social aims of nationalisation. Besides, nationalisation does not amount to socialism. The measure has served merely to strengthen the interests of state capitalism as such. It is difficult as yet to state, evidently, whether it has had the effect of serving the interests of the ruling classes in the country.