Reclaiming Development Studies: Essays for Ashwani Saith

By Anthem Press

The mission, relevance and intellectual orientation of development studies is increasingly challenged from various fronts such as decoloniality, ‘global development’ and randomized control trials. The essays featured in this collection together argue for the need of the field to reclaim its critical political economy tradition. Building on the contributions of Ashwani Saith, the contributions touch upon many of the central questions of development studies centred around structural change, labour and inequality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jun 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785279980

Book preview

Reclaiming Development Studies

Reclaiming Development Studies

Essays For Ashwani Saith

Edited By

Murat Arsel

Anirban Dasgupta

Servaas Storm

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2021 Murat Arsel, Anirban Dasgupta and Servaas Storm editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939259

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-996-6 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-996-3 (Hbk)

Cover photograph: A Boy & A Man, Deolali, 1992, by Sanjeev Saith.

This title is also available as an e-book.

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgements

Chapter OneIntroduction: The Why and How of Reclaiming Development Studies

Murat Arsel, Anirban Dasgupta and Servaas Storm

Part I Growth and Structural Change

Chapter TwoThe Rural Non-farm Economy in India Revisited: From Rural Industrialization to Rural Entrepreneurs

Shreya Sinha and Bhaskar Vira

Chapter ThreeEconomic Development in China and India: A Tale of Great Divergence

Ajit K. Ghose

Chapter FourGlobalization: An Enhancement of Opportunity or the Deprivation of Autonomy to Pursue Rapid and Inclusive Growth?

Azizur Rahman Khan and Anirban Dasgupta

Part II Labour

Chapter FiveLabour Laws and Manufacturing Performance in India: How Priors Trump Evidence and Progress Gets Stalled

Servaas Storm

Chapter SixMaking People ‘Surplus Population’ in Southern Africa

Bridget O’Laughlin

Chapter SevenEffective Demand, Surplus Labour and the Pace of Development: Rereading Kalecki and Kahn

Marc Wuyts

Chapter EightFrom Assumed Reluctancy to Enforced Redundancy: The Changed Depreciation of Labour in the Transition towards Global Capitalism

Jan Breman

Part III Poverty and Inequality

Chapter NinePoverty Reduction and Social Progress in Bangladesh: Revisiting Some Development Ideas

Wahiduddin Mahmud

Chapter TenSukhatme’s Legacy and the Indian Exceptionalism

C. Sathyamala

Chapter ElevenEnglish as a Medium of Instruction in Indian Education: Inequality of Access to Educational Opportunities

Vani Borooah and Nidhi Sadana Sabharwal

Chapter TwelveIndia’s Social Inequality as Durable Inequality: Dalits and Adivasis at the Bottom of an Increasingly Unequal Hierarchical Society

K. P. Kannan

Chapter Thirteen The Myth of Global Sustainability: Environmental Limits and (De)Growth in the Time of SDGs

Murat Arsel

List of Contributors

Index

Figures

3.1Per capita GDP in 2005 PPP $

5.1Pro-worker labour regulation and manufacturing output: theoretical considerations for the case of West Bengal

11.1The social composition of students at different educational levels (71st NSS: January–June 2014)

11.2The social composition of students studying in English at different educational levels (71st NSS: January–June 2014)

11.3The social composition of students at different educational levels (64th NSS: January–June 2008)

11.4The social composition of students studying in English at different educational levels (64th NSS: January–June 2008)

11.5The student composition of educational institutions by medium of instruction (71st NSS: January–June 2014) over all educational levels

11.6The student composition of educational institutions by medium of instruction (64th NSS: January–June 2008) over all educational levels

Tables

3.1Economic growth

3.2Growth (per cent per annum) of sectors

3.3Structural change

3.4Relative labour productivity in sectors

3.5Labour reallocation and growth

3.6Labour reallocation from agriculture to non-agriculture

3.7Labour reallocation to non-agricultural sectors

3.8Human development, 1980

3.A1Structural change in Japan and South Korea

3.A2Export–GDP and FDI–GDP ratios (percentages)

3.A3Tariff rates (%)

3.A4Employment in China and India (numbers in million)

4.A1GDP per capita growth rates for select countries 1981–2018 (per cent per annum)

4.A2Gini ratio of disposable income for selected countries 1985–2015

5.1Labour regulation and output, employment, productivity and investment in registered manufacturing in India

5.2The BB index of labour regulation

5.3The wage share in gross value added: India’s registered manufacturing sector, 1969–70 to 2013–14 (percentages)

5.4Effect of labour regulation on India’s manufacturing output, 1960–92

5.5Unit labour cost in India’s registered manufacturing sector

5.6Counterfactual analysis: India’s registered manufacturing, 1990, without either pro-employer or pro-worker amendments

9.1Trends in poverty: 1991–92 to 2016 (head-count ratio percentage)

9.2Trends in Bangladesh’s social development indicators and deviations from expected performance (as measured by the coefficient of Bangladesh dummy in cross-country regressions of social development indicators with respect to PPP-adjusted per capita income): 1981–2010

11.1Courses of study at higher secondary by medium of instruction: 71st and 64th NSS

11.2Courses of study in higher education by medium of instruction: 71st and 64th NSS

11.3The medium of instruction at primary education, by social group, gender, poverty status and sector

11.4The medium of instruction at upper primary education, by social group, gender, poverty status and sector

11.5The medium of instruction at secondary education, by social group, gender, poverty status and sector

11.6The medium of instruction at higher secondary, by social group, gender, poverty status and sector

11.7The medium of instruction in higher education, by social group, gender, poverty status and sector

11.8Predicted probabilities of studying with English as the medium of instruction at different education levels, by social group, gender, poverty status and location

11.9Number of schools in India by management and funding as of 30 September 2009

11.10The relation between medium of instruction and type of educational institution, 71st and 64th rounds

12.1Classification of Indian people into five social groups

12.2Value of per capita net worth by social group (rupees in current prices)

12.3International poverty line (cut-off in Indian rupees)

12.4Social inequality ratios in extreme poverty and poverty by social group

12.5Percentage of persons, 15 years and above, with educational attainment of at least secondary level in India by social groups

12.6Infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births by social group

12.7Social inequality in body health in India, 2005–6 and 2015–16: The incidence of chronic energy deficiency (CED) by social group

12.8Percentage of households in terms of housing deprivation by social group

12.9Percentage of households that are deprived in terms of six selected basic housing amenities in India, 2011–12

12.10Incidence of households with multidimensional housing deprivation by socio-religious group: All India (1993 and 2012)

12.11Multidimensional housing deprivation index by socio-religious group and residence (2011–12)

12.12Educational attainment, labour status and wage income by social group

12.13Social inequality ratios in educational attainment and labour market outcomes

12.14Trend in social inequality in India

12.15Social inequality ratios and ranking of social groups, 2011–12

12.16Percentage of persons, 21–35 years, with different levels of educational attainment in India by social groups, 2011–12 and 1993–94

Acknowledgements

Ashwani Saith has been a major influence in our intellectual lives. This book was prepared to celebrate his depth and breadth of knowledge, incisive critical thought and rigorous analysis that continue to inspire us.

To make the idea of a festschrift for Ashwani a reality, thanks are due first and foremost to the contributors – all of whom have long and fulfilling associations with Ashwani as friends and colleagues. Each of them enthusiastically responded to our initial invitation and has been cooperative at every stage of the rather long gestation period of this project.

Thanks are also due to Tej Sood of Anthem Press for supporting this volume from the beginning and Megan Greiving for her editorial support. Shantanu Dubey’s help in formatting and editing the chapters is gratefully acknowledged. Rekha Wazir provided critical inputs at key junctures. Finally, Political Ecology research group of the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) has generously provided financial support to help us bring the project to fruition.

MA, AD, SS

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION: THE WHY AND HOW OF RECLAIMING DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

Murat Arsel, Anirban Dasgupta and Servaas Storm

Development Studies on an Unsteady Terrain

The ground on which development studies is built has been experiencing tectonic shifts. The two social scientific traditions beneath it, development economics and the interdisciplinary study of socio-economic and cultural change outside the capitalist core,¹ have been moving apart for decades, imperceptibly at first but steadily and perhaps increasingly rapidly in recent years. While they have always used different methodological approaches, the idea of development as a long-term process of societal transformation had been a shared lodestar. As they have been moving away from each other, they have adapted vastly different ideological postures and ontological assumptions that essentially seek to negate each other’s validity and come to conceptualize development in fundamentally incompatible ways. While critical introspection and lamentation that the field is going through a crisis have been permanent fixtures of development studies (Arsel and Dasgupta 2015), these changes are particularly momentous.

Development studies as a field coalesced in the post-World War II as part of a political and intellectual response to decolonization processes. This is of course not to suggest mistakenly – as it has been common since Escobar’s ‘Encountering Development’ (1996) – that ‘development’ itself can be dated back to this very moment. What was consolidated then was a particular type of intentional development (Cowen and Shenton 1996). This reductive understanding is problematic because intentional development dominated by the interests of the West is not the only way of configuring a transformative relationship between advanced industrialized nations and their former colonies, and more productive exchanges between the North and the South are possible. Even more importantly, as Cowen and Shenton brilliantly show, the idea of development is much larger and embodies an instinct that sees the possibility of universalizing material emancipation. This latter dynamic, immanent development, animated by what Berman aptly called a ‘modern spiritual quest’ (1983, 88), is vastly more complex and enduring than anything that can be conceived by international development agencies.

Representing this richness of ambition, development studies itself has proven to be much more than its two constituent traditions, showing the potential to represent what is best of interdisciplinary and transformative social science (Payne and Phillips 2010). While much progress has been made in the intervening several decades, which development studies both contributed to and studied, the achievement of its key aspirations – material emancipation and realization of the full potential of individuals and their communities in a context of equality and ecological sustainability – remain key challenges today as they were during the 1940s. With the ground beneath it shifting, however, development studies is increasingly less well positioned to undertake its dual tasks of scholarly critique and contribution to policymaking.

A pithy way of describing the shift in the constitutive tectonic plates of development studies would be to point out the changing relationship of both traditions to their identity as ‘social science’. Development economics has been keen to downplay its ‘social’ designation and instead burnish its ‘scientific’ credentials (in line with economics as a discipline) often at the cost of its ability to capture social complexity and historical specificity. Travelling in a diametrically opposed direction, the second tradition is working hard to shake the moniker ‘science’ from its self-image, seeing it as a Western albatross around the neck of knowledge generation in relation to formerly colonized countries and peoples. As these two fields continue to move away from each other, their difference is no longer simply about how to understand, measure or achieve development. They have, in effect, become two separate fields that do not engage with each other.

Before discussing this change in broad strokes, however, it is necessary to issue two caveats. First, to the extent that the two traditions of development studies coexisted relatively comfortably – not just in terms of intellectual spaces but also physically in development studies institutions and departments – it is important to not romanticize ‘early’ development studies since there always existed a gap between the two traditions and only limited efforts were made by their communities to learn from each other. Thus, some of the most important changes – such as the rise of an environmental question – took a very long time to be recognized by development economists. Yet, to the extent that scholars moved between or at least tried to straddle both traditions, these were more likely to be development economists. Second, while the changes stylized below are indeed dramatic, it is also important to recognize that the transformations in the two traditions are far from universal, unchallenged or complete.

Development economics, building on neo-classical economics’ obsession with quantitative methods and modern public policy’s ‘evidence-based’ approach to governance, has been experiencing a perverse renaissance through its obsession of testing the impact of every potential action, intervention or behaviour, no matter how insignificant it is in the broader process of development. Following internal battles that left the entire discipline of economics vastly impoverished (Akbulut et al. 2015), development economics followed ‘general economics’ in proscribing analyses that recognized and problematized the structural features of capitalist development and how these actively created uneven development in the peripheries. Moreover, the methodological domination of quantitative tools was taken on board wholly, most recently and most devastatingly, in the shape of randomized control trials (RCT) imported from medicine (Bedecarrats et al. 2019).

The RCT approach – with its intellectual home at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and its celebrity economists (e.g. Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer) heralding their Nobel Prizes² and all the other accoutrements including seemingly unlimited funding – is characterized by poverty of intellectual as well as political ambition. Two recent papers by a collection of authors that hail from Harvard, MIT, Yale, Stanford and the London School of Economics (LSE) represent its sorry state. The first is a randomized control trial that tests the ‘causal impact of religiosity’ among poor communities in the Philippines (Bryan et al. 2021). It is not simply that the paper continues along the hugely problematic understanding of development as a process that can be reduced to individual preferences. Nor is it only that complex socio-economic dynamics are understood as a reflection of cultural values. It is also hugely problematic that the authors actively collaborate with missionary organizations and experiment on poor and vulnerable populations. One does not need to be pious to find it offensive that these communities’ deeply held religious beliefs are crassly instrumentalized.

The second paper deals with the extremely topical Covid-19 crisis, combining it with long-standing yet shallow concern with the public role of celebrities (Banerjee et al. 2020). It seeks to find out whether watching a short video by a ‘celebrity’ – in this case the lead author Abhijit Banerjee himself! – is more effective in motivating health-enhancing behaviours (reporting symptoms, distancing, etc.) compared to exposure to similar messages coming from the (local) government. Putting aside the crassness of the lead author measuring the impact of his own celebrity status (which the paper takes for granted at least in his native state of West Bengal in India because of the presumed impact of his receipt of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019), the paper is hugely problematic in its lack of concern with the underlying inequalities in economic and health outcomes among its ‘treatment group’ of 25 million people. While not every scholarly paper needs to conclude by a call for revolutionary struggle, the paper’s conclusion that ‘messaging by credible individuals’ works is vacuous to the point of absurdity.

Gone are the breadth of vision and wealth of reference points that characterized the work of the early pioneers of development economics like Lewis, Nurkse, Hirschman or Prebsich (to name only a few of an illustrious group) and the broad, historical understanding of development as a societal process. In contrast, development economics is now content to peddle short-term and essentially marginal interventions without challenging or even seriously analysing the structural realities of their subject.

That these randomized control trials are built on troubling inequalities between the researchers and the ‘treated’ communities is an important reason as to why their purported solutions need to be questioned. But the decoloniality movement, a tsunamic force that emerged from the aftershocks of post-development thinking of the 1990s (Escobar 1996; Ziai 2017), goes much further than highlighting the ethical shortcomings of the contemporary mainstream of development economics. Post-development literature had already argued, often convincingly, that the intentional development of the post-World War II era was either a cynical self-serving exercise that aimed to reproduce the dominance of Western powers or comprised of naive and ill-informed attempts of the privileged who sought to assuage their sense of guilt by implementing development projects in the tropics. Informed by the sui generis Marxism of 1970s French intellectuals, post-development ultimately argued that underlying economic inequalities made ‘development’ an unrealistic ambition, calling for its alternatives instead. These ‘alternatives to development’ nevertheless recognized the centrality in productive relations in how well-being was conceptualized and realized. Thus the alternative to capitalism was not necessarily socialism but at least a form of communitarianism, albeit one that romanticized all that was ‘local’ and ‘traditional’.

Over the years, much of the core critique of post-development – the dangers of top-down planning and the need for participation; the fallacies of uncritical application of the latest scientific and technological findings as the most desirable approach to agricultural and industrial production; and the existence of values outside of strict confines of economic production which need not be treated as secondary concerns, such as environmental integrity and gender equality – have been justifiably ‘mainstreamed’ into development theory and even practice, albeit often in a technocratic and melioristic fashion. While ostensibly building on these critiques, decoloniality has taken the debate to an entirely different plane and is gradually dragging much of the field (except, of course, development economics) with it.

Rooting itself in the colonial encounter between European empires and Latin American cultures, it recasts the resulting inequalities and injustices not as a function of economic relations but racial ones. However, the recognition of the embodied realities of coloniality – manifesting itself in the ways different colonial powers justified the expendability of the native populations of colonized lands as they built mechanisms for value extraction, be it in plantations or mines – is only the starting point of decoloniality. Following the ‘ontological turn’ in social sciences, decoloniality goes on to challenge the very enterprise of social scientific thinking. Whereas ‘development alternatives’ and ‘alternatives to development’ were visions that competed in terms of their validity or desirability, decolonial critique rejects the view that different approaches to lived reality are built on different perspectives on the same reality. Rather, decoloniality’s claim that ‘words make worlds’ opens the possibility of arguing that there are multiple different realities whose ontological validity cannot be contested.

In practice, this decolonial approach to development studies does not only argue against the necessity or desirability of development. Its proponents, having equated the scientific tradition as part of the tools of colonization of non-Western worlds, have asserted that development studies in particular and positivist social science in general are akin to epistemic violence against societies that spoke, thought, and behaved in ways that were presumed to be incommensurably different from the West. Thus in addition to calling for discarding the idea of development and the field of development studies, decoloniality questions the very possibility of a shared scientific tradition, rejecting its epistemological, ontological and, indeed, chronological, foundations because of its intimate association with European colonialism.

For instance, building on this call for diversifying knowledges, the concept of Pluriverse seeks to transcend the binary between development alternatives and alternatives to development. While Pluriverse thinking still makes reference to post-development, its ultimate goal, as stated in the preface of a ‘dictionary’ that brought together a large body of its influential proponents, is to advance a ‘process of intellectual, emotional, ethical, and spiritual decolonization’ (Kothari et al. 2019, xvii). In so doing, and putting the idea of epistemological and ontological plurality into concrete practice, the book challenges all that claims to be universal or universalizing, including ‘the idea of science as the only reliable truth and harbinger of progress’ (xviii). What follows in the book is a wide range of ideas, practices, ideologies and visions that are presented without building a coherent vision or bringing them in dialogue with each other. Thus a section of the book titled ‘A People’s Pluriverse: Transformative Initiatives’ contains two- to three-page-long entries that range from ‘Alternative Currencies’ to ‘Free Software’ and from ‘Hinduism and Social Transformation’ to ‘Islamic Ethics’. The discussions of these initiatives are too disparate to evaluate, each one too large and their subjects too complex to be assessed for their internal variations, contradictions and shortcomings. But it is important to recognize the book’s ‘matter of fact’ representation of them for what it is: this is not sloppy editorial work, nor an example of relativist thinking. In their reluctance to judge, organize and order, the editors are in fact practicing exactly what the current decolonial mode of thinking aspires to inculcate into its followers: there are myriad realities and there is no ontological plane solid enough from which they can be subjected to external inquiry.

With these two fields drifting away from each other and towards extremes, the analytical centre of development studies has been vacated. This has opened it for a redefinition of its scholarly and policy relevance. This reinvention – the attempt to speak for development as an enduring societal ambition – has most recently taken the form of ‘global development’, an approach that finds unsurprising congruence in scholarship and policymaking alike. Its basic premise is that the binaries that defined and legitimized development studies – North versus South, developing versus. developed, and so on – are no longer supported by empirical outcomes, which demonstrate a substantial degree of convergence.

The chief proponents of this approach assert that ‘more than at any time over the last century, the contemporary global map of development appears increasingly at odds with any idealized binary notion of a clear spatial demarcation between First and Third Worlds, developed and developing, or rich and poor, countries’ (Horner and Hulme 2019, 349). However, they also argue that this convergence between the geographically distinct regions is accompanied by divergence across the world, with inequality rising almost everywhere. Thus what this ‘new geography of development’ requires is to abandon the concept of ‘international development’ and replace it with ‘global development’, one that is characterized by ‘converging divergence’.

This is a ‘problem solving theory’ par excellence, arguing suggesting that the overall trajectory of global capitalism – even in its neoliberal phase – has been a productive one, as shown by the reduced poverty and increased life expectancy figures at the aggregate level. Focusing on this ‘converging divergence’ and in so doing stripping development studies from its structural understanding of development reduces the definition of development to essentially poverty reduction (Fischer 2019). Just as problematically it risks normalizing neoliberalism and the metastasizing inequalities it produces, illustrated with grim efficiency by the US$2 billion house of the Indian billionaire Ambani erected in Mumbai next to neighbourhoods of dire poverty (Saith 2011b).

The Sustainable Development Goals respond precisely to this ‘global development’ agenda with their 17 goals and 169 indicators, which take the ‘globe’ as their sphere of transformation. While developing countries do get special mention in certain goals, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are built around the ‘global development’ approach, not recognizing the structural differences and inequalities inherent in global capitalism. While its framing document Agenda 2030 speaks of radical intent (‘end poverty and hunger everywhere […] combat inequalities within and among countries…build peaceful, just and inclusive societies’ (United Nations General Assembly 2015), all by 2030!), it represents a vision staunchly in favour of the status quo, ignoring that the problems such as environmental degradation and climate change reflect the structural features of global capitalism and cannot simply be eliminated by repurposing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with the concept of sustainable development.

Development as an Enduring Societal Ambition: The Work of Ashwani Saith

The twelve essays in this book are written in honour of one of the staunchest and most widely cited critics of the MDGs (and, by extension, the SDGs): Ashwani Saith. In a number of key publications, Saith (2006; 2011b) critically interrogates the economics, the politics and the ethics of the new global development agenda and argues that by concentrating largely on developing countries, the MDG framework serves to ‘ghettoize the problem of development and [locate] it firmly in the Third World’. Quite in the tradition of his colourful and quintessentially Cambridge mentor Joan Robinson (Saith 2008a), Ashwani Saith does not mince his words: he decries the MDGs/SDGs as a systematic betrayal and dumbing down of the universal values and rights embodied in the original notion of emancipatory development as an enduring societal project. Saith rejects the de-politicized technical tinkering of today’s development economists, who as Dr Pangloss incarnate, are either busy with designing the umpteenth ethically dubious randomized micro-level control trial³ mostly to build a professional CV (in the words of the British American economist Sir Angus Deaton), or fantasizing at the macro-level about ‘global divergent convergence’, while by their research (willingly or unwillingly) normalizing neoliberalism and the inequalities it produces.

However, Saith is equally worried about the shift of the other tectonic plate upholding development studies, a shift in the direction of the Pluriverse – which when taken to its extreme would mean that a shared vision of intentional, progressive emancipatory socio-economic and cultural change is an impossibility; after all, in a myriad of lived realities which are fundamentally incommensurable (as per Derrida), there cannot arise such a developmental vision. Saith is unwilling to give up the ideal of emancipatory development as an enduring societal ambition, nor does he accept the absence of a sufficiently solid ontological plane on which to base a critical external inquiry of reality. But his work is a constant reminder of how difficult it is to do critical research and maintain a meaningful vision of social progress. Transformative emancipatory development, in Saith’s writings, is permanently contested and in need of constant struggle: it is battles, social compromises and temporary balances between classes, castes and gender, between market actors and the state, between the capitalist core and the exploited periphery, and between regions as well as industries, which up make up the political economy of development, either enhancing or blocking development at any particular historical moment (Saith 1992, 2006, 2011a). In the many years in which he was an editor of Development and Change, Saith persistently battled to protect the analytical centre of development studies, creating the scholarly space for those speaking for development as an enduring societal ambition.

Ashwani Saith studied economics in New Delhi and finished his PhD in Cambridge (UK). His initial research, mostly but not exclusively for his PhD thesis on Agrarian Structure, Technology and Marketed Surplus in the Indian Economy, focused on rural development, peasant differentiation and agrarian change. Unlike most development economists of his generation, Saith decided to do fieldwork in rural India – at the request of K.N. Raj, then director of the Delhi School of Economics. It was 1969–70 and Professor Raj was unconvinced by the optimistic accounts of the socio-economic impacts of the Green Revolution that were doing the rounds, and he commissioned an independent assessment. In joint research with Ajay Tankha, Saith visited the village Parhil, in erstwhile Uttar Pradesh, in 1970, where he felt ‘like an Indian in Bharat’ (Saith 2016).⁴ Significantly, this village was earlier studied by the Chicago anthropologist McKim Marriott, in 1950–52, and a second time in 1968. Marriott described the village as a model of harmonious modernization, a win-win for all: rather than the loss and destruction he had anticipated, he found technical progress (tube wells, tractors, new seeds, fertilizer, etc.) as well as social progress. This was not what Saith and Tankha (1972a; 1972b) found, however: in their account, village political institutions were moribund, exclusionary and completely controlled by the rich farmers. The technological advance of the Green Revolution did not run in parallel with progressive social change. Saith and Tankha revisited Parhil in 1987, one of the few and first longitudinal analyses of the same village done by economists. What they found in 1987 was stasis: while mechanization and tube-well irrigation had proceeded, real farmers’ income were stagnating (as their productivity gains were washed away by declining relative prices of their produce), tractors and pesticides pushed agricultural labour into (rural) non-farm employment (often of the survivalist type), ecological stresses mounted due to the (over-)chemicalization of cultivation, and caste, class and gender tensions and inequalities had increased (Saith and Tankha 1997; Saith 2016). Pursuing various of Saith’s themes, Shreya Sinha and Bhaskar Vira reassess the development of India’s rural non-farm economy in recent times. A review of recent data and policy interventions shows that the tendencies identified by Saith (1992; 2001) in terms of the failures of rural industrialization and difficulty of employing surplus agricultural labour persists and has even intensified in India. These tendencies now manifest themselves in various other conditions, such as diversified rural households, circular rural outmigration and growth in low-paid service sector jobs. Taking a long-term perspective, Bridget O’Laughlin’s paper on surplus population in southern Africa argues for the continuing relevance of Marx’s work on surplus population, particularly his responses to Smith and Malthus on the law of population under capitalism and the analytical importance Marx gives to ‘living labour’. She finds that the contradiction between the long-term patterns of accumulation fostered by migratory labour regimes and the reproduction of living labour is the cause of permanent under- and unemployment. Jan Breman also engages with the issue of surplus labour, presenting a very readable account of the transformation of impoverished casual labour in the history of capitalism from what he terms as ‘assumed reluctancy’ to ‘enforced redundancy’.

For Breman redundancy is at the core of the labour question in contemporary capitalism in contrast to ‘reluctancy’ in the earlier period. The inability to productively engage a large mass of the population is palpable in labour surplus economies across the Global South – a clear indication that a substantial section of humanity has become redundant to the functioning of the dominant capitalist system.

Ashwani Saith broadened and deepened his analysis and understanding of agrarian change and rural development by comparative analyses of rural India and rural (collectivist) China. It is ‘through the method of comparison that one can comprehend, calibrate and dissect, and so discover additional insights into one’s field of study’, Saith (2016) writes. In 1979, at the end of the Maoist era of high collectivism, Saith first set foot in rural China – as a member of an International Labour Organization (ILO) mission led by Keith Griffin – and he was shocked to find that while in ‘1950, India and China were credibly comparable in very many meaningful respects […] even by 1979, […], the credible comparison had already converted into an incredible contrast’ (Saith 2016). In this spirit, Ajit Ghose presents a comparative assessment of China and India’s development trajectories focusing on the ‘great divergence’ that has emerged between the two countries in the post-1978 period. It highlights two major reasons for the far better economic performance of China in relation to India. First, the initial levels of human capital in China at the beginning of its high growth phase were far higher than India – as a result of sustained investment during the Maoist period. Second, the nature and objective of economic reforms undertaken in China during the 1980s and 1990s were much better aligned to a clear strategy of manufacturing-led development in comparison to India – where the reforms were primarily about freeing up the economic space for private entrepreneurship and liberalizing trade and capital flows.

For Saith, what followed were half a dozen of study trips rural China in the 1980s and 1990s that threw up a constant flow of contrasting images to stagnating rural India. It led Saith to further deepen his analysis of the issue of the potentialities and constraints to progressive transformations of stilted village realities. The methodological challenges in comparing rural China and rural India were huge – notably because of the mismatch between the meanings and concepts, as they are defined in the researcher’s mind, or questionnaire, and as they are heard and understood by the villager from whom a response is sought. However, rather than concluding that there is no ontological plane solid enough from which the myriad realities can be subjected to external inquiry, Saith decided to build the essential capacity to communicate between villagers and researcher.

Based on detailed comparative analysis, rather than a boilerplate RCT, Saith formulated – what he himself calls – his strong hypothesis: rural institutions governing ownership of and access to (scarce) land and governing education, rural accumulation, mechanization and the build-up of local infrastructure constituted a fundamental constraint on India’s rural development, whereas in rural China, the institutional framework was repeatedly designed and redesigned as an instrumental policy variable to serve the objectives of rural accumulation and egalitarian development (Saith 1981, 2008a, 2011a, 2012, 2016). Specifically, Saith argues that India’s fragmented landholdings were an obstacle to agricultural technological progress and, combined with credit subsidization for larger farmers, led to substantial overinvestment in tube wells that was economically wasteful and ecologically damaging. Because of the institutional structure of rural India, mechanization led to labour displacing, and this negatively affected the livelihoods of the poorer sections of the village. In contrast, the Chinese commune allowed for a more rational use of machines with considerable economies of scale, and these could be much more economically utilized under collectively planned cultivation, which also pre-empted inter-farmer conflicts over water use; and in rural China, displaced labour was reallocated to other socially useful tasks.

Inspired by what he had observed in China,⁵ Saith looked at the agrarian question in socialist transitions in other industrializing countries, notably the USSR (Saith 1985a), Ethiopia (Saith 1985b) and Mozambique (Saith 1985a).⁶ The agrarian question bifurcates into two separate but interdependent issues: the first concerns the importance of the agricultural sector in supporting industrialization through the provision of investible resources which the industrial sector cannot generate itself; agriculture has to provide the resources (cheap food and cheap labour) to enable the industrial accumulation process. The second issue concerns the importance of the rural sector and peasants not as a cheap and elastic source of resources to be employed and used in industrialization, but rather as the subject of socialist development. In the socialist industrialization strategies he analysed, Saith found that the two roles of the agricultural sector were frequently incompatible. According primacy to accelerated industrial growth in these socialist countries often generated inter-sectoral imbalances, in the form of shortages of food for urban workers and of raw materials for manufacturing firms, which were resolved by relying on price incentives and markets, allowing the peasants to operate their own private landholdings, and on selective commodification (of new agricultural technologies) – in sum, by following Stolypin’s ‘wager on the strong and sober’. These interventions inexorably diverted the trajectory of societal transition away from any socialist direction. Marc Wuyt’s chapter in this volume revisits the agrarian question in the industrialization process, building on the writings of Michal Kalecki and Richard Kahn. He argues that the near exclusive focus on supply-side factors in the literature on industrialization deflects attention away from the role of effective demand in shaping processes of accumulation. Drawing on Kalecki and Kahn, Wuyts demonstrates how the interplay between consumption and investment is critical in determining the nature of accumulation, particularly in a context of a surplus-labour economy.

Ashwani Saith extended this analysis to non-socialist countries in a long and brilliant paper titled ‘Development Strategies and the Rural Poor’ (Saith 1990). Countries like India decided to raise yields and introduce Green Revolution technologies in commercial crops produced by the surplus farmers in selected, richer, regions, well endowed with (irrigation and other) infrastructure. For Saith, Stolypin’s wager was a gamble on ‘agricultural trickle-down’: growth of agricultural gross domestic product (GDP), spearheaded by the commoditization of the surplus-controlling rural propertied classes, was hoped to spill over first into more broad-based rural development, while later on firing the engine of (rural) industrialization – and all this was supposed to happen within the prevailing grossly inegalitarian institutional and land-ownership structures that characterize most developing countries. It did not work (Saith 1990; 1992; Storm 2015).

Saith’s strong hypothesis may be stated as follows: egalitarian modernization and successful rural accumulation require collective land arrangements and non-market coordination. This had been noted early by his mentor Joan Robinson (1979, 135): ‘Some kind of cooperative or collective property in land and in means of production is necessary to provide a frame in which modernisation can go on without polarisation between wealth and misery which it is bringing about all over the Third World today.’ Saith’s strong hypothesis surely offers one of the sharpest political-economy insights into the causes of the failure of most rural development programmes around the globe to bring about modernization and all-around social progress – and it constitutes a major lesson not learned by (rural) policymakers, macro development planners and World Bank economists. Saith would probably agree with Robinson’s (1962, 79) assessment that progress in economics is slow ‘partly from mere intellectual inertia. In a subject where there is no agreed procedure for knocking out errors, doctrines have a long life.’ Modernization without polarization is the theme