Employment Policy in a Developing Country A Case-study of India Volume 2 : Proceedings of a Joint Conference of the International Economic Association and the Indian Economic Association Held in Pune, India

Underemployment in the midst of poverty is the endemic disease of a great part of Asia. The joint conference of the International Economic Association and the Indian Economic Association recorded in these two volumes was designed to look at this vast and dangerous problem. But it was desired to look at it in the context of all the practical and institutional difficulties of finding a solution. India was taken as a casestudy, both because it was a country in which this problem was particularly acute, and because many Indian economists had thought and written about it. The plan of the conference was that Indian experts, organised by the Indian Economic Association, would provide all the papers for the conference. The International Economic Association would send to the conference a group of foreign experts, with a background knowledge of India, who would take a major part in the discussion and criticism of the papers of the Indian experts. This was in fact the first time that such an intensive discussion of a single problem in a small conference, extending over more than a week, had ever taken place in India. The result is a most important book, focused on all the different aspects of the problem. Volume I begins by trying to establish, with papers by P. R. Brahmananda and N. Rath, the dimensions of Indian underemployment -a matter about which there is considerable dispute. It goes on, with papers by A. Vasudevan, C. Rangarajan, Uma Choudhury and others to look at the constraints on any policy of expansion and job creation arising from shortage of savings, of foreign exchange, of appropriate technologies, and other sources. There follows a section on the objectives of development, with papers by Gautam Mathur and V. M. Rao. A further group of papers deal with incentives for development; the writers include N. J. Jhaveri and M. Ahluwalia. The next group of papers, in Volume 2, describe and criticise the attempts of successive Five-Year Plans to deal with the problems of employment; authors include Brahmananda Prasad and D. T. Lakdawala, himself largely responsible for the Draft Sixth Plan. A number of papers deal with the conflict of poverty and unemployment and whether the cure for one is the cure for the other. A final and most interesting group of papers look at the differences between different Indian States; K. S. Gill writes about the successes of the Punjab; Mrs Dandekar describes the Maharashtra employment guarantee scheme; other papers look at the different problems of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Finally P. R. Brahmananda gives an account of Indian academic thinking regarding employment policy and P. D. Hajela and John Toye attempt to sum up the lessons of the conference. Throughout the conference there was vigorous discussion, introduced by the visiting economists, who included A. R. Khan, Deepak Lal, Pranab Bardhan, A. Farouq and Rafiq Ahmed, all with a South Asian background but working outside India, and Just Faaland, Esra Bennathan, Austin Robinson, Stanislaw Wellisz, Clarence Gullick, R. Grawe, U. Hiemenz and Heather Joshi, among others. John Toye has most successfully summarised the lively arguments among these and among their Indian counterparts. Contents Front Matter....Pages i-vii Front Matter....Pages 361-361 The Employment Strategies of the Indian Five-Year Plans: Reasons for their Failure....Pages 363-395 Employment Goals in the Five-Year Plans of India....Pages 396-404 Employment Strategy in the Sixth Plan....Pages 405-413 Employment and Manpower in the Draft Plan 1977/8 to 1982/3....Pages 414-438 Choice of Strategy in a Labour-abundant Developing Economy: An Empirical Analysis....Pages 439-460 Front Matter....Pages 461-461 Unemployment and Poverty: Is There a Conflict between Policies to Tackle the Two?....Pages 463-482 Poverty and Unemployment: Some Estimates for India of the Employment Implications of Income Redistribution....Pages 483-502 Does Output-growth Necessarily Imply Employment-growth?....Pages 503-514 Front Matter....Pages 515-515 Employment Policies for the Absorption of Technical Manpower: The Indian Experience....Pages 517-527 Rural Artisan Development Strategies and Employment Generation....Pages 528-546 Front Matter....Pages 547-547 Employment and Unemployment in Punjab....Pages 549-581 Tackling Unemployment in Maharashtra through the Employment Guarantee Scheme....Pages 582-594 Employment and Unemployment in Karnataka....Pages 595-617 Employment and Unemployment in Tamil Nadu....Pages 618-639 Employment and Unemployment in Kerala....Pages 640-672 Front Matter....Pages 673-673 Aspects of Academic Thinking in India on Employment and Related Policies....Pages 675-721 The Conference in Retrospect: Some Basic Questions arising out of Indian Experience....Pages 722-734 Comment on the Conference....Pages 735-738 Back Matter....Pages 739-746