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Literary Review
A record of imbalances
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A comprehensive book on development issues, India's Development Experience is also an expose of the failure of the Indian political class's performance, says S. SWAMINATHAN.
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SANJEEVI GUHAN was almost by universal consent, India's most brilliant and compassionate bureaucrat. His administrative career spanned nearly 50 years and left nothing untouched — all the administrative areas, developmental portfolios and institutional affairs, ranging from local government to international, financial institutions.
The book under review is a masterpiece which is as comprehensive on India's development issues as it is a no-nonsense expose of the vast hiatus between the mandate and the performance of the Indian political class. The book is indeed enormously difficult, with all its repetitions, to read. Definitely, it is not a reviewer's delight!
There are 13 sections in the book, including quite a few personal reflections and extra-curricular material. It is obvious that the editor had a Herculean task, not knowing exactly what to include and what to keep outside the volume. Discontinuities and even repetitions have, therefore, become inevitable.
Guhan was known for his passion for national development; but, at the same time, he was known for his deep disappointment with the policy regime in India over a long period. He was not for the IMF-World Bank prescription of structural adjustment. Nor was he a laissez-faire carryover from his student days. He questioned tenaciously the Bank-Fund view that if only fiscal deficit could be brought down in the poorer countries, it would be nivaran for them. On many delegations as a representative of India, Guhan boldly voiced forth the disgraceful backlog of external debt, which the poorer countries continued to suffer from. But for his lack of interest in high-profile appointments in government and in supra-government organisations, Guhan would have contributed a great deal more to policy-making in India and at the international level. His work for the Brandt Commission has, of course, won well-merited appreciation.
In a review of this nature it is perhaps presumptuous for the reviewer to attempt an evaluation of where Guhan stood in the political spectrum of India. That he was a constitutionalist not easily given to amendments required by self-seeking politicians, is quite clear. Nor did Guhan leave anyone in doubt that the encroachment of the States under the insidious Article 356 of the Constitution had any moral, legal or objective justification. Guhan could be described as a stalwart social reformer of the Periyar School. His sympathies were solidly with the backward classes. It is known that Guhan was a practical source of counselling and help to many a young person in Tamil Nadu.
Guhan was extremely frustrated both with the corruption at the administrative, political level and also at the lower rungs of the administration. He had no ready solution for corruption but he had no doubt that corruption had a large contribution to make to poverty.
The two sections on social security and social expenditures in the Union Budget 1991-1996 provide an illuminating analysis of how the recasting of public expenditure in tune with massive deprivation in Indian society can be promoted.
This volume on Guhan is something more than a tome; it is a mini-encyclopaedia on India's development record — a record of abject imbalances and neglect of the poor.
India's Development Experience: Selected Writings of S. Guhan, edited by S. Subramanian, OUP, p. 360, hardback, Rs. 625.
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