Articles by A Vaidyanathan

Imperatives of Institutional Reform A Vaidyanathan This paper underscores the crucial importance of institutional reform, particularly in the domain of public systems, for sustained technical progress and output growth in agriculture. The scope for privatisation is limited in irrigation, research and extension and other infrastructure facilities. All of these will continue to be mainly the responsibility of the public sector. Unless the public sector's efficiency in mobilising resources and managing these facilities is vastly improved, trade and price policy reform will not make a significant difference to the pace of agricultural growth.

now of foreign power investors in the scheme of things.
The Enron fiasco has brought out the pitfalls in the current path of power development in the country. It is time that we take quick remedial measures before the power situation gets completely out of hand. The need is for a package of reforms that restore health to the State Electricity Boards and work out means for the least cost expansion of the power sector. India will do V M Dandekar well to learn from the South Korean experience. The South Koreans have expanded the state sector for providing basic infrastructure like power and telecom while looking to the market for other areas. Instead of working out our distinctive path of development appropriate to our stage of development, the government is substituting slogans for policy. Unless this is reversed and hard thinking goes into working out concrete alternatives, the future of the power sector looks bleak.

Variations in Educational Performance in Tamil Nadu A Vaidyanathan Manabi Majumdar Drawing primarily on the census data, this paper maps the inter-taluk variations in the level of literacy in the state of Tamil Nadu as well as changes in this respect over time. The data show significant variations across taluks in terms of literacy achievements during the period between 1971 and 1991. To take the analysis one step further, this paper presents, albeit in a limited manner, some facts on educational facilities and literacy status in the villages of two Tamil Nadu districts. The underlying motivation of such disaggregated study is to develop useful typologies of taluks/villages which may, in turn, constitute the basis for both designing micro studies as well as discerning macro trends.

State's Role in Development A Vaidyanathan WHILE national planning and particularly the role of the state in guiding and shaping economic development in our country has always been a contentious subject, there was a rather wide consensus around the time of independence about the necessity for the state to play a leading role in the development process. The reasoning of course varied: The Bombay Plan prepared by leading Indian businessmen saw massive public investments in infrastructure and basic industries as being necessary to facilitate growth of the private sector and set the country on the road to rapid development. The socialists emphasised the importance of public ownership and state control over the private sector to correct the existing inequities and injustices, as well as inequities and injustices associated with unfettered capitalist development. In the event a compromise evolved in which the basic concept of overall national planning with a major role for the public sector was accepted but the bulk of production and a large part of fresh investment was still left with the private sector.

A Study of Spatial and Temporal Variations A Vaidyanathan This paper examines inter-state and inter-district variations in total labour input into agriculture per unit of area and the reasons for these variations. Also discussed are the determinants of rural non-agricultural employment. There exist quite large regional variations in the ratio of non-agricultural to total employment in rural areas and an exploration of the reasons underlying these variations could hopefully provide some basis for judging how far they are amenable to manipulation by policy Salient Features of Labour Use in Rural India FOR a long time the decennial population rensuses were the only source of information on the pattern of employment in rural India: Every census gives some idea of the proportion of rural population engaged in economic activity, and their distribution by sector of employment. Pretty detailed sectoral break-up of the working population is generally available upto the state level though at the district level only broad sectoral pattern of employment is published. However, problems of determining the activity status of particular individuals, the fact that workers often do several types of work covering different 'sectors', and the difficulties of capturing the intensity of employment in a short questionnaire administered at a single point of time have severely limited the usefulness of their data. In order to overcome these problems, the NSS took up intensive surveys of a scientifically selected sample of the population from rural and urban areas all over India. Though these surveys were started in the fifties, it took time to evolve suitable standardised concepts and procedures