Give a critical account of the debate on deindustrialization in India? what is your opinion in this regard.?
Answers
India is not an industrial country in the true and modern sense of the term. But by the standards of the 17th and 18th centuries, i.e., before the advent of the Europeans in India, India was the ‘industrial workshop’ of the world.
Further, India’s traditional village economy was characterised by the “blending of agriculture and handicrafts”.
But this internal balance of the village economy had been systematically slaughtered by the British Government. In the process, traditional handicraft industries slipped away, from its pre-eminence and its decline started at the turn of the 18th century and proceeded rapidly almost to the beginning of the 19th century.
This process came to be known as ‘de-industrialisation’
While estimating the distribution of global output of manufactured goods, P. Bairoch concluded that India’s share of manufacturing output in the world was as high as 1.9.7 p.c. in 1800. In a span of 60 years, it plummeted to 8.6 p.c. (in 1860) and to 1.4. p.c. in 1913. The declining share of industrial output in the’ world output could be attributed to an absolute decline in manufacturing output per person.
This may be a process called ‘de-industrialisation’. Daniel Thorner defined de-industrialisation as a decline in the proportion of the working population engaged in secondary industry to total working population, or a decline in the proportion of population dependent on secondary industry to total population. But in India, quite the opposite rule worked and the nationalist economists like R. C. Dutt and M. G. Ranade labelled it as the process of ‘de- industrialisation’ since the bulk of the population found agriculture rather than industry as a means of livelihood.