ADDRESS BY SHRI K.R. NARAYANAN, VICE-PRESIDENT OF INDIA, AT THE ANNUAL DAY OF THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF APPLIED ECONOMIC RESEARCH

NOVEMBER 10, 1992

 “Human Resources Development - Role of Social Science Research”
 
Human-centered development is the major theme in contemporary national and international thinking. It is now realised that people are the centre-piece of economic development. “The process of economic development”, said the Report of the U.N. Committee on Development Planning, “is coming increasingly to be understood as a process of expanding the capabilities of the people”. The UNDP’s “Human Development Report 1990” came to the conclusion that “Growth with equity is the optimal combination for generating good macro-conditions needed to achieve human development objectives.” Thus, the basic objective of development, has been spelt out as creating a conducive environment that enables people to lead a long and healthy life, to be literate and knowledgeable, and to maintain a reasonable standard of living through satisfaction of their wants. However in the midst of pre-occupation with GNP growth rates, savings and investment, imports and exports, policy makers and economists in developing countries have tended to give diminishing attention to basic human needs and concerns. While these are important factors in development, it is now realised that the focus must be shifted to human resources and expanding the capabilities of the people for the next stage of development.
 
There are distinct echoes in this new economic thinking from the days of the Indian nationalist movement and early planning after Independence. Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of the development of India was based on the people, their basic needs and their self-reliant efforts. His vision of an ideal Indian village was one that was constructed to lend itself to perfect sanitation, with cottages with courtyards enabling people to plant vegetables and to house their cattle, with lanes and streets free of avoidable dust, with wells accessible to all, with a village common for grazing cattle, with a co-operative dairy, primary and secondary schools where industrial education was imparted, with panchayats for settling disputes etc. This vision contains almost all the elements of human development that is to-day expressed in the learned language of economics. Gandhi’s was not by any means a retrogressive outlook, but a progressive one. Gandhi had an obsession with health care, passion for literacy with the result that he advocated conscription of teachers for a mass campaign, and he believed that Swaraj will have no meaning if people remained unemployed and idle.
 
After Independence the democratic system and the path of development we adopted constituted some kind of a new experiment in social engineering. As far as democracy was concerned, it was an unprecedented attempt to work a Parliamentary system in a desperately poor, illiterate and undeveloped society. As for development there was also no parallel in history of attempting it through democratic processes within a Parliamentary framework. The result, in social and economic terms, was a partial and not all-out response to the basic needs of the people and a somewhat slow process of capital formation and investment. It was a delicate balancing between the needs and demands of the people in the present, and the long-term requirements of development. That the human factor was a dominant consideration in this approach was clear from the following statement in the First Five Year Plan document. It said “.economic planning has to be viewed as an integral part of a wider process aiming not merely at the development of resources in a narrow technical sense, but the development of human faculties and the building up of an institutional framework adequate to the needs and aspirations of the people.”
           
In the Introduction to the Third Five Year Plan, written by Nehru himself, it was stated : “Although planning involves material investment, even more important is the investment in man . Basically the task is one of developing the natural and human resources of the country through the widest use of knowledge and technology and improved organization.” Later in 1962 Nehru stated: “We can measure success or failure in development by certain physical standards and statistical methods. But those standards and methods ignore certain immaterial and immeasurable things, which ultimately count for more than anything else. Success means raising the material, moral and spiritual level of the people.” This statement goes a little beyond the tangible parameters of human development spelt out by UNDP and the more thoughtful of modern economists. My purpose in going back to some of the central ideas behind our plans for development is to show that most of the new thinking on the subject are not brand new discoveries.
 
For us, the rub lay in implementation and in the lack of resources for effecting “investment in man” and investment in industrial infra-structure and in material factors of development at one and the same time. Economic equality and social justice, the core of human development, were conceived as an inevitably gradual process, as economic development itself was looked upon, in the prevailing objective conditions of the country in spite of an underlying passion for change.
 
That was obvious from the following statement in the First Five Year Plan itself, which said: “. hasty implementation of measures intended to bring about economic equality may, in the short run, affect savings and the level of production adversely; it may even make it difficult to effect a smooth transition to the type of planned economy that we envisage. This does not mean that existing conditions have to be continued. The rate at which progress may be made in the direction of equality has inevitably to be adjusted to the requirement of the present economic situation.” This pragmatic or conservative socialism, if I may use that phrase, was buttressed by another argument Nehru used in the First Plan itself and repeated innumerable times later:- “The elimination of poverty cannot, obviously, be achieved merely by distributing existing wealth. Nor can a programme aiming at production remove existing inequalities. The two have to be considered together; only a simultaneous advance along both these lines can create the conditions in which the community can put forth its best efforts for promoting development.” The result of this balanced approach was the so-called “Hindu rate of growth” on the one hand and the lagging behind in human development on the other.
 
One consideration behind this slow approach towards human development was the view of the planners that the whole of India was a vast underdeveloped area, and that general development has to take place first, the people beginning to taste the fruits of development and the country possessing some infra-structure before sectional and regional disparities could be given special attention. It is, perhaps, thus that planned efforts for human development such as Minimum Needs Programmes, anti-poverty programmes, desert area development, drought-prone area development, programmes for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, for women and children, for supply of drinking water, literacy campaigns, health for all programmes, etc. could be undertaken only much later on a nation-wide scale.
 
I have, perhaps, tired your patience by recounting the past. I have done this because I believe that it is only on the basis of our past achievements and realisation of our past short-comings and mistakes that we can move forward without throwing the whole system into chaos. Obviously, there had always fallen a dark shadow between the plan and its implementation. The bureaucratic deformation of the planning and administrative process, and the emergence of corruption as a major phenomenon, had the effect of distorting the developmental process and defeating some of its objectives. It is with this in mind that I said on a few occasions in the past, with a lot of exaggeration, that we are a people more planned against than planning.
 
Yet we have made some significant progress. The rate of GNP growth crossed the Lakshman Rekha of “the Hindu rate” of growth. Though some of our economists now bewail the crossing of this sacrosanct line, I believe that without progressive increase in the growth of GNP no human development programme could be sustained. We have built up a sizeable industrial and technological infrastructure including an impressive scientific-technical pool. We have achieved basic food sufficiency. We have avoided major famines during the last four decades, while in some other countries famines occurred during this period taking a toll of millions of lives. While health and literacy rates are poor, the average expectation of life has gone up to 58 or 60 years from 32 years which is not an inconsiderable achievement. Parts of India have shown spectacular growth in literacy and average expectation of life and population control. One major fact that we emphasize to-day is the growth of the middle class to the size of 250-odd million people. Now, this massive educated middle-class did not come out of the head of Brahma, but from our developmental process, ironically from some of our socialistic policies. Poverty, though it exists in colossal dimensions, has come down to around 27% from above 50% in the past.

These are still very inadequate achievements, especially when we make comparisons with other developing countries. In this context it is not inappropriate to point out, as the UNDP Report has done, that in the United States of America after 200 years of economic progress, nearly 32 million people, about 13% of the population, are still below the official poverty line. That is no justification for our failure, but it is worthwhile to bear this in mind to understand the enormity of the problem, and to place in proper context our new economic liberalisation policy and its concomitant emphasis on human development.
 
In the past if human development had to wait for some degree of economic growth, to-day any further significant economic development can take place only if human resources are trained, mobilised and applied. Social sciences and social scientists have an important role to play in this. Intellectuals and economists like Mahalanobis, Pitamber Pant, Dandekar, K.N. Raj and others had contributed significantly to our developmental ideas and strategies. The well-known United Nations study on Kerala undertaken by K.N. Raj and his associates from the Centre of Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, eventually led to the emergence of the basic needs paradigm in development theory. Particularly the role of women’s literacy in population control and the general welfare of the family and society, came clearly out of this study. Another study by Prof. T.N. Krishnan of the same Centre undertaken for a Harvard Seminar brought out the importance of social intermediation in health transition a developmental factor. I must confess here that not only the benefits of economic development, but even potent ideas of development do not easily “filter” down in our society or spread in our country horizontally with facility.
 
Social scientists in our country have to, in my opinion, first of all, go deeply into our experience in human development and into the ideas, philosophies and methods that prevailed in our country. Secondly, we have learned by experience that measures targeted for the poor hardly reach them as the majority of them do not participate in the formal activities and institutions through which we try to reach them. Through micro-level studies can we identify the socio-cultural and economic factors that act as constraints to their participation in the development process ? Can the social scientists suggest to policy makers and planners the type of policies and interventions that are necessary ? More extensive and intensive studies are required as to how women can be associated with the developmental process. A major field of research could be directed to overcoming the unavoidable financial constraints by exploring alternative methods of delivery systems in the areas of literacy, health, sanitation and water supply. One useful area of exploration could be how science and technology could be applied at grass-roots levels of socio-economic operation in order to upgrade traditional and existing technologies, and get more out of every developmental project, while at the same time introducing a new vitalising element of modern knowledge.

It may be recalled here that the Science Policy Revolution drafted by Nehru had talked of the application of technology to make up, to some extent, for the scarcity of capital and other resources. In sum, social scientists can make a crucial contribution by focusing on relevant issues and suggesting ways and means of integrating human development issues into our development plans.
 
In a particularly insightful passage in his concluding notes to the General Theory, John Maynard Keynes wrote, parts of which I quote : “.Ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.” I have tried to show that the ideas of human development to-day are not the newest, but they are ideas whose time has come. The social scientists have to grasp them and project them into a new developmental strategy.

Thank you.