Relevance of Gandhian Economics Today | Social Issue Essay, Article, Paragraph for Class 12, Graduation and Competitive Examination.

Relevance of Gandhian Economics Today

Scheme of the essay

Exposition: Gandhiji wanted economics to be three-fourths spiritual.

Rising Action: Gandhiji never recognised economics to be unrelated to the environment.

Climax:

(1) We need spiritualised economics to eradicate poverty, unemployment and disease.

(2) Massive foreign investment will lead to mafia power and corruption.

(3) The subversion and weakening of the national will have made its client people increasingly dependent on statecraft.

(4) He foresaw all of these harmful effects of industrialisation.

Falling Action: India with limited capital and huge manpower should resort to small-scale industry.

Ending: Gandhian economics is more relevant today than it was in the past.

Sam Higginbotham, the American economist, wrote to Gandhiji that “spirituality to be meaningful should be three parts economics”. Gandhiji agreed but pointed out that economics too, to be useful, should be three parts spiritual. Gandhiji never recognised economics to be autonomous. It has to operate in a larger environment of crime, violence, corruption and manipulation. If the permit-licence-quota raj provided a kind of environment, the reforms raj provided and even more dangerous kind of environment.

The degree and depth of corruption have increased involving not just hundreds but thousands of crores of rupees in scam after scam. People at large have been defrauded of their hard-earned savings in scams in the name of reform. Reform was claimed to be the answer to political and bureaucratic corruption and delay. On the other hand, the new policies of the government have increased both corruption and delay. Reform has not solved the problems of poverty, unemployment, squalor and disease.

Unbridled emphasis on so-called development without regard to environmental and ethical factors has already resulted in control by the mafia of the political process as witnessed in the affair of East West Airlines in which former Congress Chief Ministers, Central Ministers bureaucrats and relatives of the highest in the land interceded on behalf of a band of gangsters, smugglers and criminals behind the Bombay bomb blasts, and thwarted action against people recommended by the Minister of State for Home Affairs, Mr Rajesh Pilot, on the basis of a note prepared by an investigation agency. It is in this context that the Government’s policy of inviting foreign investment should be seen. The consequences are serious. The giant multinational corporations are known to have subverted governments in Latin America for private profit. They have little concern even for children’s health as was experienced in the Union Carbide case of Bhopal.

Massive foreign investment of multinational companies thoughtlessly and indiscriminately allowed in this country will add to money and mafia power. The international mafia with its wide expertise and experience in acquiring a strange hold over government and the media, manipulating opinion, suppressing information, brow-beating dissent and buying up the professional classes can provide a perfect setting for coterie role and mafia despotism. The subversion and weakening of the national will would make for a client people who will become increasingly incidental to governance and State-craft. This new despotism will be propped up by the general apathy of an enervated people and the collusion of a middle class corrupted by a consumer civilisation.

All this was envisaged by Gandhiji who was tireless in preaching against economics untampered by spiritual, ethical and environmental considerations. He clearly foresaw that an economic policy based merely on large industry would only lead to national as well as international crime and despotism. He saw that in such a scheme fewer and less people would be involved in the process of development and more and more people would be outside the purview of its benefits. Apart from these factors, he also cautioned that what was good for countries with limited population which developed in an era of colonial exploitation would not necessarily be good for a country with a huge employment force and limited capital. He was strongly of the opinion that economic growth should take into account the country’s factor endowment.

India with a massive unemployed labour force and meagre capital should as far as possibly depend on small industry with a high labour capital ratio. The pace of mechanisation must be in tune with the pace of capital formation. This will also take into account environmental problems and ensure people’s participation in development and governance. Basic industries like power, steel and defence projects will necessarily have to be in the large sector. But, in essence, we will have to seek and accomplish an appropriate technology to harness unemployed labour for productive and remunerative employment. This will help in reviving the villagers, checking the migration to towns and stemming rural as well as urban decay. We should not believe in gigantism for its own sake and will have to be selective in investing large amounts in grand and long gestation projects which generally only fill the coffers of the rich.

This policy will bring the small men to the centre of economic development and will greatly reduce the role of national and international mafia and there will be greater scope for a transparent, moral and democratic government.