Articles by Arun Ghosh

and reaction, India will provide you with a natural habitat.
The authorities have one great advantage; they are incapable of taking the long view. Once the message spreads that religious obscurantism is the password for advance inthis land, any number will get into the act. Competition will ensue between different groups over how far they could slide back into dark, darker, darkest eras. Outrageous concepts will come to enjoy a political premium. The paraphernalia high technology bequests will be put to use to propagate deviant causes of increasingly outrageous proportions. With every day, new sects and tribes will emerge, vying with one another to win the badge of the most reactionary order. Till as long as the authorities are bashful about ditching adult suffrage, each such sect will need to be placated. There will be little prospect in this climate of much economic development, most of the nation's resources will have to be deployed in the pursuit of this or that far-out target. Soon, resources will be under tremendous strain, and it will be impossible to satisfy I KEEP coming back to this theme. In fact, I keep coming back to Udaipur and talking of the environmental problems of Rajasthan as if what is happening in the countryside in Udaipur district is typical of the entire state. This is obviously not correct. But, Udaipur has the largest tribal population in Rajasthan, and parts of this beautiful district continue to be incredibly poor. Even if not wholly representative

Banking and Decentralisation Arun Ghosh The adoption in India of the US pattern of banking

Advocates of monetary targeting recommend demand management in tune with plan investments and planned growth, via control over the volume of credit to the private sector. The snag, however, lies in the judgment over how much expansion of money supply is consistent with the 'need' for increased monetary circulation as part of the development process.

Hrinum Kritwa, Ghritam Pivet Arun Ghosh There is a real danger that in a few years the Indian economy would get deadlocked with large investment needs but without the requisite domestic savings and the prospects of external savings also drying up, A point of no return would then be reached when domestic borrowings would fall to provide any net resources to government and the only recourse would be open-ended deficit financing with consequent hyper-inflation.

The Plan versus Departmental Prerogatives Arun Ghosh THE planning commission is reported to have been described some time back by its own exalted chief as a pack of jokers. Over the years, there has, of course, been a visible dichotomy between the plan programme and the action taken by diverse departments of the government, supposed to implement the plan. Latterly, the plan programme itself has come to be modified so as to reflect administrative (instead of planning) priorities. And the planning commission has, for quite some time, been known to bend itself backwards so as to incorporate within the plan the ad hoc flashes of inspiration that appear to suffuse the thinking of whoever happens to be the head of government. (In a sense these are flashes of inspiration in that the new programmes suddenly dreamt up are essentially designed to get the maximum propaganda mileage.) In this background, the mid-term appraisal of the plan assumes a somewhat interesting role. The latest mid-term appraisal of the Seventh Plan, presented to the National Development Council recently, is, however, interesting in more ways than one. One has of late come to expect blind sycophancy from ail those who occupy positions of authority and privilege in the central government. Instead, the latest mid-term appraisal shows, at least in part, that there are still some people left in the establishment who are capable of independent, cogent and coherent thinking. The pack of jokers, it turns out, has a few aces disguised as jokers.