Coming as it does four decades after D.R. Gadgil's death, this publication of his select writings provides us an opportunity to look at the direction he gave to the practice of Indian economics. His reputation as a builder of social science institutions is, arguably, second only to that of V.K.R.V. Rao. The real impact of his creations is on the institutionalisation of the way economics was, and continues to be, practised in India.
The most significant of these practices was undoubtedly the total rejection of the economics of the national movement. Maybe, there is much that can be challenged in the economics associated with that movement. It is possible to argue that Ranade's complete rejection of the Western classics was somewhat extreme. But Gadgil led the Indian economic thinking away from the economics of the national movement by simply ignoring the latter.
As P.R. Brahmananda points out in his Gadgil Centenary Memorial Lecture (reproduced in this volume), Gadgil's The Industrial Evolution of India, though written as early as 1924, has “very few references to the earlier works by Indian scholars… There is no reference either to Ranade or to G.V. Joshi.” The unexplained break from the economics of the national movement did not, however, help Gadgil use ideas from the Western classics to understand the Indian economy. By 1941, he was challenging the claims of universality in Western formulations. In his presidential address to the Indian Economics Association, he insisted that much of that theorising was for a series of static situations, while an economy was in a process of continuous transition brought about by technological change and other shocks.
The economy was, for him, always in “a traverse from a traverse to a traverse.” His objective then was to indicate policy initiatives that could be effective in this process of continuing change. His scepticism about the value of theoretical models led to a focus on empirical micro pictures, which, in turn, led to an emphasis on local solutions, as reflected, for example, in his faith in the cooperative movement.
Discomfort
Gadgil's discomfort with large models may not have immediately become the norm in India, with the Mahalanobis model in the Second Plan launching the ‘Nehruvian economy'. But he himself saw that Plan as little more than a set of allocations and insisted that it made no striking departure from the past. Were he alive today, he would find the current policymakers sharing his disdain for theory. The liberalisation process has thrown up few theoretical innovations comparable to the Second Plan model. The absence of a theoretical approach has contributed to the widely-shared view that a work is relevant only if it can lead to immediate policy initiatives. And this view is not without its costs. Without a conceptual framework, it becomes difficult to take into account factors which, although not influential at that point in time, could spring a surprise later. The unwillingness to use theoretical formulations to anticipate problems has also contributed, in no small measure, to the dominant Indian practice of reacting to, not anticipating, crises, with the liberalisation process itself being a response to the balance of payments crisis of 1991.
The quiet shift from theory to empirical detail contributed to Gadgil's genius focussing on the method of generating that detail. Here again, his choice was more widely accepted than it was debated. As Suhas Palshikar points out, “Gadgil followed the empirical-positivist method of social enquiry.” This method, which is rooted in Karl Popper's philosophy of falsification, became the ‘methodological gospel', as it were, of Indian economics. Even those who are at the other end of ideological spectrum vis-à-vis Popper often regard this method as the only scientific one. Whatever challenge there has been to it came from outside the realm of economics, particularly from M.N. Srinivas, a sociologist. The only offshoot of that debate in the 1970s was the emergence of a wide gap between the practice of Indian economics and that of Indian sociology — a gap that is yet to be bridged.
An enigma
Given that Gadgil's contribution is in the realm of entrenched practices more than in specific debates, it is hardly surprising that he proved to be an enigma for those who were keen to put him into an ideological box. In a sensitive essay, the communist icon S.A. Dange does not hide his great respect for Gadgil, the man, and the challenge he was willing to pose to monopoly capitalism, but regrets that he never crossed the line that would have brought him “nearer to scientific socialism than [to] bourgeois economics.” To try and place Gadgil within the confines of ideology is to ignore his real impact on Indian economics. One hopes this publication of his writings will kindle a serious debate on issues related to the practice of Indian economics that have not been debated before. If that happens, Gadgil would have got justice that was overdue.
