Indian Modernization: 1947 to 1965

Both before and after the Republic of India became independent in July of 1947, Indian nationalists were concerned with enacting those reforms -- political, economic, cultural, even military -- necessary for India to emerge from its impoverishment. The early years of independent India were marked by considerable disputes as to how this could be accomplished. A large and vocal segment of the Indian political classes favoured the establishment of a planned economy, one that would divert India's financial resources towards the creation of a substantial base of heavy industry and a modern system of higher education, with the aims of creating a vanguard economic sector that could pull the rest of India's economy out of the Third World along with the necessary professionals and technicians. Gandhi, for his part, drew upon the successes of the West's cooperatives, the pioneering development techniques of Yucatán, and his own personal preferences in the education and organization of India's illiterate and apathetic masses via community-level institutions. Were this development policy -- what Gandhi and his supporters called sarvodaya, meaning "the uplift of all" -- to be implemented, the priority would be given towards providing basic educational and medical services to the Indian masses and enforcing basic social and political rights for all people, with the aim of allowing India's hundreds of millions to provide a much larger population capable of participating in a modern economy. Following the dissolution of the Congress Party and the formation of the first Indian coalition government at the federal level in 1949, and the unfortunate death of Gandhi from natural causes in that year, sarvodaya policies were indeed adopted, with the sole exceptions being a complete rejection of the caste system and the financing of these programs not entirely through taxing of India's modern industries but with foreign loans and grants.

Though the Indian government continued to enforce national standards well into the 1960's, India's different states -- from 1953, drawn strictly along linguistic lines, with Bombay being partitioned into Gujarat and Maharashtra, Hyderabad being absorbed for the most part into Andhra Pradesh, and so on -- reacted to sarvodaya policies differently. At one end of the spectrum, the state governments and populations of the north Indian interior were quite hostile to these relatively egalitarian policies; the prominence of the upper castes in all aspects of life and the growth of exclusivistic Hindu nationalism made state governments very reluctant to countenance policies that would give members of lower castes, women, and non-Hindus an equal footing with conservatives, and accordingly sarvodaya was delayed as much as possible. India's northwestern states -- Haryana, Punjab, Delhi, and Himachal Pradesh -- were more hospitable to the educational and medical elements of sarvodaya than the political and social elements, for fear of entirely disempowering historic hierarchies of power.

The western states of Gujarat and Maharashtra, however, never mind the progressive southern states of Tamilnad, Karnataka, and especially Kerala; were exceptionally friendly to sarvodaya as a whole. The reasons for the openness of these five states to sarvodaya has been much debated, though most explanations concentrate upon the relatively high levels of industrialization and urbanization in these regions as well as their historic openness to trade and migration and the relatively low profile of conservative upper castes. Regardless of the reasons, these five states went to great lengths to enforce sarvodaya: state governments did at least try to ensure civil and political equality for all of their citizens, affording even Muslims relative freedom from persecution, while state governments did go to considerable expense, even drawing heavily upon state budgets, to establish dense networks of primary schools and medical centres for the largest segments of their populations.

The progress acheived by sarvodaya was slow, at first, but as the 1950's ended and the 1960's began signs of progress began to appear. For instance, thanks to the new networks of schools and medical centres, literacy rates rose sharply even as death rates dropped by some 30% between 1951 and 1961 as reported by successive national censuses, and these improvements could be directly correlated to the relative enthusiasm of each state in adopting sarvodaya. In the five western and southern states (known collectively as "the KeKaTMaGu states"), one unexpected result was an above-average decrease in birth rates, traceable to the better health and education of these populations as well as to the beginnings of female empowerment. In Kerala, sarvodaya was augmented by the formation of financial cooperatives by peasants and the urban poor. Inspired by European models and organized by indigenous democratic Communists, Kerala's financial cooperatives played a preeminent role in providing non-traditional entrepreneurs -- peasants, for instance, or women -- with the capital needed to create their own businesses. Before long, the "Keralan model" was being copied throughout India.

Simultaneously, the "Bombay Plan" proposed by economists C.N. Vakil and P.R. Brahmanand suggested that capital-poor India could develop quickly by exploiting its very large workforce to produce "wage goods," simple consumer products like clothes, toys, radios, and bicycles. These low-capital low-risk manufacturing processes would attrack domestic and foreign investment even as they enhanced the consuming power of the masses and pushed investments into agriculture and rural infrastructure. This plan was controversial for its neglect of heavy industry, and it was never implemented fully. Inasmuch as it was implemented, though, it worked quite well with the principles of sarvodaya. Within a short time after the partial adoption of the Bombay Plan's principles, industrial growth began to accelerate in northwestern India.

The Second Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 coincided with the Indian federal government's White Paper of National Development. This government document reviewed the successes achieved by sarvodaya nation-wide and in selected states and concluded that with almost half of the Indian population possessing basic literacy skills and life expectancies estimated to be as high as an estimated 55 years, and with the enfranchisement of broad swathes of the Indian population, India's newly large and relatively healthy and educated population could well trigger rapid economic growth like that experienced elsewhere in the Third World. India's hard-fought military victory over Pakistan signalled the beginning of a shift in state and federal government policies, as increasing amounts of government (and private) funds were shifted into higher education and heavy industry, while foreign investors began to establish off-shore manufacturing plants in the KeKaTMaGu states. Nonetheless, the basic policies of sarvodaya remained in effect throughout India until the Third World War and the end of the Indian state in 1982, and were enthusiastically copied throughout the Third World.