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Book Review
Making India an investment destination
INDIA'S TIME — Essays in Honour of Murasoli Maran: Vinanchi Arachi Jebamalai — Editor; Kadiroli Publications, Teynampet, Chennai-600086. Rs. 200.
THIS BOOK is not just a bunch of panegyrics by admirers of the Union Minister for Industry and Commerce, Murasoli Maran, as its title might suggest. Even the last of the 12 essays in the collection on him as an intellectual of the Dravidian stock is very much a discussion of world trends towards a departure from notions of state-directed economic planning which had remained unquestioned for a long time until it was becoming clear beyond doubt that those who were clinging to them had only feet of clay.
India has come a long way since late 1962 when the DMK was finally persuaded to give up its separatist movement — possibly because of the traumatic Chinese attack — and rejuvenated itself for an intensified participation in national politics and in the Union Government. Mr. Maran would not have imagined that he would be drawn into a future when he would have to visualise and frame the industrial development policies for the country as a whole with an integrated India having won over the DMK. If, as the contents of the book anticipate, India becomes an inviting destination for foreign investors, he could indeed claim a role for having brought it about. The message of the 21st century — and which he seems to have grasped fully — is that the earlier doctrines about the State withering away had to be shed but in a manner very different in ways which the Communists could never have imagined. Nor for that matter did the free market advocates have the slightest inkling that they were asking for the moon when they were pleading for disengagement by governments to make economies a playing ground for free enterprise. Governments have had to stay as active facilitators for national and global investment by giving all the incentives and the removal of the roadblocks. This is what has happened in the newly industrialising economies of East Asia and, judged by the results, they are the winners. And it is here, as the contributors have pointed out correctly, that Mr. Maran is playing a role as the Union Minister for Industry and Commerce and he is doing it very well.
Among the recent arrivals in economic thinking the world over and to which one of the contributors, Jebamalai, has drawn attention to is the ``industrial theology'' of having to ``collaborate to compete''.
This could lead to the disturbing possibility of the collaborators eventually ceasing to compete and getting together as oligopolists for achieving for themselves a stranglehold over the world economy. The possibility of the powerful MNCs holding out the velvet glove to the captains of industry and governments in the developing countries for eventually making them their willing vassals is regarded as very real by the leftist opponents of liberalisation and globalisation which is very much the philosophy of the Government to which Mr. Maran belongs.
There is, however, no reason why this should happen if governments make it clear that they would be calling the shots all the time and it is in the interests of national and global industry to play the game on these terms.
The contours of India's industrial policy, which he has been shaping, have been very well outlined in the book, which is very well written.
CVG
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