 East New Manchester's views related specifically to the countries of the, what he called, the East. And he was constantly wondering about the geometry of the East. That is a high birth rate. That's what he can translate into. Which he thought would be a very great problem for what he called the civilized countries in which he did not obviously include the countries of the East. Why would it be a problem? Because it would lead to a rise in the supply cost of the country's population growth in the East. It's taking place would mean that the price of food globally would rise. It would express itself into the world. And this would affect the standard of living of populations in civilized countries. This is what he is not confined to the case of his writing which was just after the First World War in economic consequences of the East. And now a way, I found that there was no objective basis at all in those years. Because if you come to the rate of population growth in India and you are specifically worrying about India, then that is pretty sluggish for me. Then there was absolute defying of population between the censuses of Manchurian and Latin America. Absolutely. Mainly because of the massive influence of the epidemic of 1980. A little over the period from 1900 to 1931. India's population grew 17%. But Britain's population grew by 32% or the same thing. So if anything the picardity was in Britain, the picardity was not in the East, and there was absolutely no objective basis for this case. The other point on which I have revised my views of population, which never agreed with the population growing in India, is the low question of pressure on resources. Because out here, which is still going forward and which later also, more recently, when you had the first-class spy, the global first-class spy was named. Nobody thought to like George Bush, who was the president of the US at that time. And he would be one of his, like for two minutes, saying that the sole cause, the major cause for the food first-class spy was because the very large populations of India and China, which were increasing their average incomes, were demanding more food rates, and that is what had caused the boom first-class spy. So again, you know, the case in here is getting defective, decades and decades later, by a modern economic system. And I realize that, you know, this population growing, a list of, let's say, not-of-patterns, which even gains were subject to. Other gains was from let-off honest hearings, which was criticized fairly centrally by a million revolutionaries, who was a progressive person who later drew up the plan for the legal part of the first state. So revolutionaries pointed out there were mistakes in his argument. But the major mistake that he not only means that he thought he would make, is to make the population as identical to the demand. Of course it is not. Because demand is not a function of numbers alone. It is also a function of local capital. And as a matter of fact, in the three decades, is it three decades, nineteen, ninety-four, five, a couple of four decades, in the decade and a half, before the food price spied, the capital means demand in India was falling to 45 substantial. And this is something that we don't know about. But so was the capital complaints demand in China. Because China had been diverting very large areas of land from food grains to cotton production, supply had come down. And there were other measures, macroeconomic measures, which had impacted aggregate demand from the rural areas, in particular, really adversely. So in a situation where what happened, the demand was actually falling. All the food was pointless actions. This is not even known about what is discussed or understood by leading the Congress in the moment. And I regret to say, it doesn't seem to be highlighted even by Congress, even Congress in our own time. But what is it, which is leading to this kind of decline of aggregate demand which is getting dependent on the decline of basic food grains in China? So this is an area, I think, on which people have to speak up a lot more to counter the kind of financial schemes which are rampant through the scheme, which not only emigrate from normal universities, but the pernicious nature of these schemes is not understood sufficiently, I think, by our own progressive government. At least we don't talk about or we don't criticize these theories to the extent that they show with one or two honorable exceptions of how a chair is made. I remember reading something, you know, against Putin. But the second thing I want to say is that I have much prominent methodology and my lack of view on this. And I think the whole of the process for development theory out there, and I think where I've been in the post-proper is based on a fundamentally wrong model of what capitalism is all about and how capitalism industrialization actually could face. In the countries of its origin is Britain, France, Germany and later on generalised in the United States and the Netherlands. The fundamental model that our economy is operating in is that we can replicate that part of the world. So the story goes something like this. You have an agricultural revolution which raised productivity in agriculture which released David. This was of course the progressive who was also saying that there was a tremendous displacement of small producers small peasants and so on, pocketiers and so on, from agriculture. But the growing industrial sector there was a lot of revolution going on commercial and cultural transformation but primarily the growing industrial sector absorbed these displays, there might have been some additional uncoilic there might have been period in which there was some distress but eventually they all got absorbed in the expanding habit of the industrial sector. And the same model has now put forward a lot of people who are farmers and farmers to say that what we need is a transfer of low productivity unorganised labour from agriculture into not the non-adventure sector and that is a solution to all that great emphasis. Now this fundamentally does not is a missed reading of the entire process historically of capitalism. And it is also a missed reading of what was not possible in countries like ours. First of all, there was no agriculture in the U.S. and that is something that can be clearly established from the input to work that their own economists have done in the work of agriculture to show that between 1700 and 1820 actually the output of basic regions that is of heat actually big time for the per capita for the per capita for at least a substantial percentage. So where does that come from? There was social retribution all that there was the emission of small commodities in consolidation of foreign goods to large capital response but it cannot even be the emission of new models of new industrialisation in what part of the retribution of new industrialisation has come. Why was industrialisation not constrained? Well, major reason was of course the extraction of colonial service. Either these who were so directly extracted from the colonies or the colonial customers were used while they had been stored from the products which were in demand in advanced industrialising countries. And you extracted from that a lot of talking there should be people should be possibly surrounding the people that are there they are okay. So I am going to say two minutes because you have distracted me from the stream. So the whole colonial experience is something that our economies don't take into account. In fact they don't even bother to read our own colonial history or go into it. That is absolutely essential for the economy for itself and for itself in the colonies. Once some of the students interviewed me and asked me why don't you seek the development economies to govern history not just development economies but all economies even if there are many econometrics even if there is something which seems to be very theoretical they cannot claim to be all economies unless they know how the development history leads to their own coming if not of that of this industry. The other thing is that you did not get legal adsorption in industry the classical things only a small function of this makes legal adsorption and there is massive unemployment the only reason that the rest of the countries did not exist in revolution the law of social discontent political discontent and that is what Marx said they would be socialist revolution on the basis of for example the Tartus movement in England that did not happen because they outfired the economic system and this is something I think maybe you don't find on these textbooks is not something that about half the increment population in Britain every year migrated for two centuries between 1821 when England and Wales population was about 12 million and in 1915 16 million persons migrated out of the country more than the initial population migrated out of the country currently two North America and other lands which they have of course seized by force from originally candidates is that option open first did you say people should move out of the country without your revenue to go can industry absorb them of course not at the time I was writing my thesis in the late 1960s I found that of manufacturing of the country the same way of manufacturing at least the employment capacity with respect to art was positive what is it now I mean you have already heard something else I think in earlier sessions in some sectors it has become negative and there are only one or two sectors in which it is at all possible so Tartus now partly are not interested in employment they are interested in profit it is everywhere I am interested only in profit so if you are talking about the employment that is not something which is going to be solved within the present you will get to know no matter how much you impact still the workers you are only working at the micro level within an overall macro system which is generating more and more unemployment and unemployment since I only have 10 minutes if we stop there I appreciate the sense of a teacher to do all the years better for me if we get to the subject of the other thing I am not an expert for me something that I have had to contain which I am trying to understand something perspective of thinking about climate change to the frame of thought of the Tartus is not my point if you come to talking about climate change not so much as academics and more perspective is here when we are not talking about climate there are two challenges one is the kind of mainstream climate change so slap that together of seeing from proposition many states which have grown out its in the economies by a variety of many years ago but why methodology acquiring and doing that that was the idea what was it together what was it together and the basic idea is here is an urgent problem we need to quantify it what we want and how we must have some kind of that which leads us to some kind of problem so it is a not to try to understand of how really slap that because really a number really often from the I know enough so this is one of the unfortunately because a lot of the on the development by the and the really a body of time who have this view that here we have to cover it is a problem so we have this problem how to be social political political economics and I think so how to because department department and after some you will get some kind of problem from that I think but more or less we need to be trying to but if you bring up an economic department and I may not say this already the economics department can ask and why you create more of an expertise you are coming in as many as you can because because it is somehow a difference that it is there let's debate and review our academy in originality they will be responsible for the convenience and viewpoints that's how I think so in the idea of style of discussion we have to therefore without the economics department and get another kind of I think so it is really a fact that that is the good news on the other hand you know the question of in relation particularly to writing it to whether the rules of whether all these things in a serious development are not for mainly and that for a very large issue that pertains to the order of the and there will be some environmental criteria and so we have to not think that despite the urgency of the urgency of the because we we see it as because of academic I think when this question was how it was developed when alas I don't view it how do I view it yes that that that that's what that if we as we as in this development this is this is a proposition I I do so I was because I was fortunate to have a whole lot of teachers who actually explained to us to me and to other students the reality of capitalism without fudging matters these days it's very common to come across views which basically fudge matters but that you must not forget was barely a couple of decades or not even that much perhaps after independence and as a result the fact that capitalism in the metropolis was the progenitor of mass poverty that capitalism has this tendency within it to generate poverty is something which was explained to me and to other students by a group of outstanding brilliant teachers and that is something which has always remained with me and I believe that is a proposition which is valid looks like absolutely right I agree with her completely that the view that capitalism can bring about development and that historically it did so is a completely misplaced view let's look at it the whole idea we think in terms of development as a transfer of large masses of population from a low productivity low labour productivity sector the so called traditional sector to a high labour productivity sector the so called modern sector and the belief is that this is what capitalism achieved historically from this belief it follows that even if capitalism destroys that pre-capitalist or the traditional sector doesn't matter ultimately all of them are going to get absorbed into the modern sector anyway so why should we shed tears about the enclosure movement why should we shed tears about the fact that some peasants even today in India are getting evicted and so it doesn't matter because after all once we have Thara going capitalist development they would all get absorbed anyway and they would get absorbed at much higher levels of living than they were used to and what is more once the labour market becomes reasonably tight these levels of living would go on improving therefore we must not shed tears about the destruction of the traditional sector that is what development is about and capitalism would actually shift from the traditional to the modern sector the theoretical counterpart of this is something which we all know as the Lewis model which actually pictureizes this transfer in a very vivid manner now the point is historic career would say that this is something that capitalism has not achieved on its own scheme the fact that in western Europe large numbers of people who are displaced from their traditional habitats because of the disclosure movement and the process of primitive accumulation of capital ultimately did not hang around as an unemployed impoverished impoverished mass was because of mass immigration but large numbers of people recapitalist producers who were destroyed because of the influx of capitalist commodities in the colonies which of course after all is an impact of capitalism they continued to remain as a vast I mentioned my teachers that the roots of modern mass poverty in India lie in colonialism this morning when I was listening to I was quite amused by the fact that neither Harold Mann nor Gilbert Slater who are worried about rural poverty factored in the whole question of colonial rule as a contributor to rural poverty but the point is anyway so that poverty is something which remained and remains with us the roots the origins of modern mass poverty in society like ours lie with the fact of colonialism which is the obverse of capitalism in the metropolis you look at the theoretical side of it when you look at the theoretical side you look at the Lewis model the problem with it are very well known there are three problems I want to draw attention to draw attention to the others the first of course there is no role of demand let's ignore that problem let's assume that says law holds and there is no problem of demand that may obstruct the expansion of the modern sector but if you think in terms of the modern sector expanding on its own steam the fact is that all capital accumulation is associated with technological progress whose essence is a rise in labor productivity and as a result the Lewis model has constant labor productivity the moment you factor in a rise in labor productivity then it follows that the rate of growth of employment is nothing else but the rate of growth of output in the modern sector I am talking on the modern sector minus the rate of growth of labor productivity if it is the case that the rate of growth of employment which I mean these two is less than the rate of growth of the workforce plus of course whatever unemployment is being generated in the traditional sector which is seeking work in the modern sector then it follows that you actually far from absorbing workers from the traditional sector you would actually be creating further unemployment in the economy and along with it further poverty as a result you may have high population in the modern sector but if that accumulation is associated with rapid rates of labor productivity growth which capitalism engenders then it would be accompanied by growing poverty you know many of you would know that this is something which is so little understood that we actually find for instance our political leaders talking about how we must raise productivity no we must in fact limit productivity growth if we are interested in full employment anyway so that is obvious now suppose it is the case I mean the story doesn't end there suppose it is the case that actually you do not absorb the labor from the traditional sector in that case your wages continue to remain in the capitalist sector think of the Lewis model at your subsistence level but your productivity is rising as a result the surplus is rising now when surplus is rising income distribution is becoming more and more unequal when income distribution becomes unequal that is something which is serious in itself which people like Piketty are now talking about that is something that would generate problems of aggregate demand which I am assuming a way but additionally it also implies that the kind of demand pattern that is generated tends to be even less employment intensity you give a rupee to somebody in the village let us say or you will give a rupee to a worker then the worker will not only spend the rupee but spend it on commodities which are relatively labor intensive but if you give a rupee to somebody in Delhi in that case the Delhi middle class person would probably not spend the rupee or if the person does by my assumption spend the rupee would do so perhaps by having a holiday in French Riviera which would create zero employment here as a result you find that distribution becoming worse would then further raise the rate of labor productivity growth and further compound the problem of unemployment now this is intrinsic to the fact that capitalist growth is associated accumulation as Marx had said is associated which increases in labor productivity suppose for a moment we assume that actually employment does increase which I was saying that you know employment in fact in many sectors there is negative rate of employment let us assume that employment does increase but when employment does increase what you would find is that if the capitalist sector this is the third point about the Lewis model suppose the modern sector buys some goods from the traditional sector in that case if employment does increase and if the goods bought from the traditional sector are demanded by the workforce in the modern sector then you would find that since the traditional sector is not necessarily expanding you would find that there would be a problem I think Ashok Mitra and Shukumanchak wrote about the whole question of terms of trade moving against the modern sector but to me terms of trade are less important more important is the fact that there would be an inflation in the prices of the commodities basically wage goods and therefore that would destabilize the wage unit and that would destabilize the value of money in the economy at which point there would be an effort made to cut back on employment as a result I am suggesting that the rate of growth of employment is in fact the min of the two the min of G minus the rate of growth of labour productivity in the modern sector and what is permissible what is permissible as a non-inflationary rate of growth of employment in the modern sector given the sluggish growth or the stagnation in the traditional sector now even this that you would find that employment would not increase and even employment does not increase in that case you would actually find that poverty would actually worsen over time two minutes right so it seems to me therefore that all this talk that you leave things to the market create conditions where animal spirits of the entrepreneurs are boosted and so on all that may generate GDP growth frankly GDP growth leaves me cold as I must say it had left even jumps toward middle cold let alone Karl Marx but the point is that GDP growth leaves me cold but fundamentally it is not going to make any impact as far as poverty or employment is concerned two minimal things which follow from what I am saying one of course is that therefore growth has to occur within what we call the so called traditional sector itself not through a process of primitive accumulation of capital but by preventing a process of primitive accumulation of capital in other words I think a growth trajectory where petty producers themselves then through cooperatives, collectives and so on change their own modes of organization and the state comes to their help in raising their rate of growth through increases in land productivity because that is what is required for the high growth rate which both on the supply side provides wage goods and the demand side provides markets is one essential component of it the other essential component is that technological progress leading to fast rates of growth of labor productivity is something which can be handled if you have a work sharing product sharing ethic now of course a socialism requires a work sharing product sharing ethic but the work sharing product sharing ethic by the way is also there if you have let us say ok I will give you an example the only countries to date actually have hit full employment and labor shortage are the former socialist countries why did they do that because of the fact that they impose certain limits on structure to change in the former Soviet Union if a mine became unprofitable it would be closed down now if the mine is not closed down it is actually sustained through a subsidy from the government which is raised in the form of taxes in the form of a work sharing product sharing ethic as a result I think it is very important that two things one is land augmenting technological change which can come about by depending promoting petty production and through land reform of course that gets rid of land lordism but on the other hand through that voluntary development of cooperatives and collectives and the other is the inculcation that ensures that labor productivity grows does not give rise to unemployment these are the two essential components for an alternative trajectory and to my mind both these components require a kind of socialism which is precisely characterised by these kinds of things thank you I am not going to be at all as grand as some of the what we have done and beginning with noting that I think Benin's friends have been very nice of full and active organisation that we begin with not so much the idea of development which I had or how I changed it but I think what most of us here would recognise is simply go through the CEF the curriculum of the time in terms of what have you been what was used to be taught earlier and how has our teaching of this been changed over time and I think that's not a tough exercise and I think you will see it even in CSP's own compulsories in terms of which have ceased to be compulsories and more importantly in terms of things which are still there on our course list and what people actually take up when it comes to options so development to some extent at least the study of development in economic departments is to some extent itself a product of what we call economic development by the nature of it now let me come to my own issues Mark has more or less said what were the things what were the things which were considered important 50 years ago and that's roughly when I was in my PhD thesis for example was around the issue of and for a long time this was essentially what those of those of them were thinking about Indian development were thinking about what are the constraints to Indian development yes there was population but mainly it was capitalism there was balance of payments then there was a wage good problem around those issues of the problems of what was preventing India from becoming a really developed country there was this whole attitude that we needed planning again about models which modeled capital investment which modeled the constraints to various things like the price the inflationary barriers which is the wage good constraint the much more important immediate constraint then was the external payments constraint and you got a situation where at least when we were students we were given these elaborate models and the study of economics at least of Indian economics consisted in part of history in part of standard against book courses, manuals but a lot of it was trying to actually convert into models what people were thinking about India and the most important things we could read about were Indian plans and that is where supermoiles great contribution of itself summarized the whole thing and it was actually a masterly treatment of what India was in a sense Indian now sit today and think about what has happened and we hardly now talk about the balance of payment constraint and that is not because it is suddenly overcome the essential problems our current account deficit this year will be close to 3% which is roughly the highest it has usually been I mean it has stocked about 4.4% but 2.8 is higher than our average in this case our trade balance is well over 10% of GDP and that is pretty much about the highest it has ever been so we have not solved our external payments problems by any means but this is not something that we think about why because it is gotten used to the idea that there will be this portfolio capital which will keep coming in and the portfolio capital will actually make the economy to whatever it is doing to avoid an immediate balance of payment problem look at our agricultural sector our overall rate of growth over the last in our sense Indian it has been about 1 hour it has been about 4 years but it has been a little less than 2% it has been 1 hour the point is our rate of growth of agriculture is not up by any means compared to what we were concerned about when we were thinking about of wage good constraints when we were thinking about an agricultural constraint and that despite the fact that the population growth rate then was 2.5% or near about that and today our population growth rate is around 1.5% so without that because growth actually growing your population growth rate has come down and that might have given you some leeway but today people are actually writing I mean there are people in the situation of continuous surfaces on agricultural growth I mean there are people saying that the problem now is surface rather than so that doesn't seem to be the problem either the problem is that the farmers are complaining and the green prices is not a constraint to the capital they think the problem of the farmers themselves no I think that is again important because if you look at again how we look at development nowadays somehow this idea that development consists of trying to develop the forces of production and use the forces of production in a way that might serve the cause of improving the standard of living of people somehow we have gotten to a situation we don't talk too much about the causes of production at all what we do instead is we talk about some macroeconomic stability we do talk about government but we don't see government as trying to plan any development what is the government doing is only really two things one build a little bit of infrastructure there are infrastructure there are infrastructure shortages so build infrastructure secondly do a certain amount of social sector spending and social sector spending is seen as provide health provide some education things but these are really add-on these are not these are seen to be add-ons not part really of the development process itself and this is something I think many children should actually claim into the world increasingly this is happening in a state or rather a collection of states in the union of India where the revenue side not only is it that the production side is nobody talks about but the revenue side that is the place where the ability to spend comes from has been hugely centralized at the end of the situation the completion of the this process about the from VAC to JST you have now come to a situation where the central government more or less collects 90 percent of all revenues now given this you now have developments seen as really people were spending money and spending money it should be spent well there should be accountancy accountability and therefore what it has almost what allowed to be is spend it on infrastructure and also infrastructure spending there is a lot of backing or you spend it on some social sector expenditure but that also in a time bound manner it is not actually thinking in terms of a whole program of thinking in terms of we will develop it's still development rather than development of people now I think there is something wrong now I can I could go to the extent that Radha said that somehow changing or at least reiterating the fact that nothing will work in capitalism I think one needs to ask what would work in the situation that we find ourselves it's not a question of will something emerge from elsewhere and as far as the whole point about the models taken from the west and things are concerned today I don't think most people even know about what they are actually thinking of is if China can do it why can't we I think that's really what the issue is all about and that is a question worth asking that is economy which is in the few things I just talked about he is exactly the opposite they don't run the sort of huge deficits we do in fact the deficits we run run our economy there are the deficits we run drive our stock markets the deficits we run are really worries driving so much I mean by deficit an external account deficit is driving our inequality and I think going back to the essence of actually clucking the economy that the productive side of the economy to the resource in that hand is something economists learnt as the first first part of what they did today we forgot about it and I think that is the problem of the Indian economy as compared to say the Chinese it's not a happy occasion but I'm glad that here we are to celebrate in its work its friendship and I'm glad that at least some of you are implicitly committing yourself to realize it is part of that friendship of what I promised what I intend doing is slightly different it's not really playing between I said I think I've learnt over these last four decades which I will state certainly is something you can benefit from but really to point to certain uncertainties which I've increasingly accumulated over all these years which I think makes it far more difficult to be a development economist today than when I started being development economist and I joined MA in 1973 and I came from physics partly because like him I I because of the creation of the whole and he was associated with and so when we came in my batch the people came in at that period it was an unusual period that what was considered to be the principal strategy countries, underdeveloped countries should adopt when they launch on development the understanding was that what you need to do is launch on import substituting industrialization that you set up barriers, barriers, quantity of restrictions you formulate a set of state policies which allow you behind those barriers then when I go closer to it it starts making all the success so that you need to have a set of state policies which allow you to then behind these barriers accelerate the process of growth and you need to have industrial growth and you need to support that process with practical land reforms which actually gave land to the tailor which present energies created a mass domestic market for manufactured production goods and so on and so forth it appeared that a generation before us set grown up with a clear strategy which needed to be adopted in which it was possible to make significant advances beyond the framework of capitalism and in fact there were some people at that point of time who had to argue like Bill Gordon etc saying that he wasn't being extremely successful the left says that there wouldn't be much industrialization in the other country but look at them, actually they are really posing ahead but by the time we came in India's case by the mid 1960s early 1970s by the time we came it was clear that there was a serious problem with those institutions so the trajectory we had to take was to say that this is because the institutional change required to actually have successful industrialization in a post-decolonization in the world of our world cannot take place under regimes which pursue market dependent or market dead strategies that you need regimes which actually went in for deep institutional change a kind of socialism our world we defined it depending on the specific persuasion you came from and you had options it's true that there were problems emerging in Soviet Union but it was there there was China which had partly got over the problems of industrialization so you could point to these countries and so you became more radical we said this and all this thing doesn't work you finally meet the institutional reform and it's possible look at what Vietnam is going to do now that was happening at that time this went on for some time and what became obvious was that actually in practice in most of these countries what is happening with an import substitution was continuously being displaced by a strategy which undermined import substituting industrialization but did this prove through the neoliberalism in previous talks that the whole idea was neoliberalized trade neoliberalized capital flows put on those path and it depends on you know whether you come to foreign countries in Latin America which had started doing this earlier you came from India which is where it happened later and of course really began to happen after the 1980s but even in 1981 we already had an I am a grown and all of us were joining those including Prabhakar and many others attacking the government having gone in for that grown and doing all those things so the thing was it was a tension now on the one hand you needed to defend the import substitution against this neoliberal non-slot but you were coming from an environment in which you are saying this import substitution doesn't work you actually need to go beyond this framework of you need to have an institutional change so it was a development what position do you take and you actually have a new end strategy you need it at some points to defend Nehru, defend import substitution etc and other points of time you have to say none of these has got a lot of problems it doesn't actually implement land reforms etc etc and you know therefore the pressure to recognize that you know there are some successes of this other strategy of course maybe state led there was a South Korea, there was a Taiwan Singapore might be a small city state but there might be at least two and people would turn around you and say you know at least about two there was one successful import substitution outside the framework of countries which adopted sentry plan development so then you kept fighting you kept having these new end positions and of course 1997 came and there was a crisis in Southeast Asia which was excellent because then you said you see you know if you go down this trajectory if you liberalize trade then you will be forced to liberalize removal capital controls or because you need the capital to finance the deficits which are and if you do that boy you are going to go kaput and even the most successful miracles they got it all wrong the bank and iron work were saying these were great miracles next year down the line pilot had just been declared a great miracle and next year down the line it had this you know this devastating crisis so once again it appeared that ok we have got some leeway here so you can say the battle is against finance now the problem is of course before this happened the collapse of the soviet union so in part we have lost something you know we have lost something in terms of saying that you have to go and find reasons why soviet union was an exception and therefore it doesn't mean that if soviet union meant you can't have an alternative with deep institutional change which is I love you domestic market based growth so you needed to combine this benefit you are getting from the 1997 crisis with some kind of an explanation that you know the soviet union is an exception 1999 was a complete 1991 was a complete collapse and then you had the other problem that people then started turning to you and saying ok you might say soviet union is an exception is China capitalist or is it socialist because look at China of course it had some success till 1978 but ok the success after 1978 there is after South Korea and Taiwan a case of a country which has actually moved from underdevelopment to near developed countries according to some indicators then it's a country which has actually gone down a path which seems to be more of a capitalist path and therefore you needed to then basically say that no no but you know finally you need you need intervention laws of some kind you need a state which is out there and doing whatever it has to do etc but the only way you can defend it is to say that you cannot there are only two cases of success you actually cannot have a trajectory in which you try to go on the basis of the world market because many countries have tried this now so the case seems to be clear now that if every country tries it it's going to be a problem and every time one country is successful like China now it's just one country which is successful you don't have multiple countries so we need an alternative but the moment you say we need an alternative then they're going to say what is that alternative and you have to say that you have to put yourself up by your own footstraps you've got to grow on the basis of your domestic market particularly countries which can have a large domestic market and then you come back to that problem of deep institutional change but this time in the world in which you don't have examples to point to because China also is not particularly an example so therefore you actually have an accumulation of uncertainties you know that there must be some way in which you can exit from backwards you know that there is no real case because South Korea as we used to argue it's a client state it has a special relationship the United States, Taiwan was equally based for American troops etc etc but even if we say all that China was successful, China was only one which is still true with that kind of strategy it depends on the significant measure on the world market but then it is now trying to rebalance on the basis of domestic market that you come to a point of time when you have to go back to argue that you need deep institutional change you need something called socialism however you define it today whatever form it takes in your definition do yourself a piece of your own domestic market and have that strategy but some of us are sort of gradually fading out of the economics but for those who are coming it's a far tougher battle you don't have anything to point to and you have only experiences of failure in a world in which the success has still been confined to the metropolitan west Trump notwithstanding you know the European crisis notwithstanding so we have crisis we know there is a big problem out there but to reconstruct an alternative or conceptually in practice has become more difficult it means one with uncertainties which makes like exciting for all of you who are now coming to the other economies I was almost brutally honest where do we go from here I can open it up for responses reactions would any of you like to come back on something just a couple of minutes just a couple of minutes yeah well there is a phrase which Pranath used earlier which he did not use today which I think is quite useful and that is the idea of epistemic it's a bit of a mouthful so what basically means by that is that you know most of us lack the facility for epistemic exteriority we cannot please ourselves outside conceptually outside the existing system with all its constraints so really really we tend to internalize those constraints and therefore we do not even push for the kind of policies which we could be pushing for and you know I don't think we need to be shame-faced about the need for socialism at all or say that it only arose because of a whole series of disappointments it has been clear from day one and it is absolutely clear today that if we adopt this epistemic exteriority then we ask the question what is the indicator of success metropolitan west has been successful what are these indicators of success is it their GDP growth is it their per capita income or is it the whole question of what has happened to the labouring poor in these countries how have they failed what has happened to the people what is the situation with respect to mass welfare and here I think the capitalist model is something that's subverted not only our intellectuals that is this whole idea that I was talking about of a seamless more or less you know smooth transition out of agriculture into higher productivity industry it's also subverted China's leaders from the 1980s so I would not call China a success because if you look at the criteria of what has happened to the population of China the standard of living particularly the rural poor with the break up of the communes with the reform policies in China from the 1980s those policies were absolutely disastrous for the rural poor with all its problems and defects the commune system has had built up a basic welfare system of free elementary healthcare free education and egalitarianism which was a massive achievement for a country which had started with immense wealth and income inequalities just as our country had done so don't forget that those who followed the reforms in China were cashing in on 30 years of egalitarianism earlier they had more room to play with and where had they brought that country to today so I would say that we use terms like success far more carefully and as far as our own agriculture is concerned Abhijit mentioned that there are people who are talking about services now in fact not all we have a situation where we are exporting millions of tons of food grains whereas the standard of living of our population the average standard is the lowest in the world now in terms of grain consumption per capita we are right at the bottom we are below the least developed countries average we are below the African average ok so let's not become complacent and let us also try and as far as we can to achieve some degree of epistemic exteriority and not to fall in the trap of using the categories that are common in the economic literature the development literature which is really not about development at all which is basically about capitalism and how capitalism can function smoothly our definition of development has to be something very different