(...Contd)

This grievous problem will require heroic solutions and vast amounts of money.
Industry will have to face many specific problems of its own, including those of raising adequate finance and foreign exchange, minimising the frightful delays from which all projects seem to suffer in our country, developing adequately trained skilled labour forces and management cadres, and above all, in maintaining a reasonable degree of discipline in factories without which production on the scale contemplated will be impossible to achieve. Today India loses every year in labour stoppages of one kind or another nearly 10 million man-days as against 50,000 in Germany which has twice the labour force.
In the light of all these problems and difficulties, the task before us will indeed be a heavy one. The job can be done, but only on the basis of a total cooperative effort akin to a war effort between Government, Industry, both private and public, and every organisation and individual in the country capable of playing a significant economic role, however small. A programme of this magnitude cannot succeed if for political or other reasons, it is subjected to interminable delays in decision and execution, to endless red tape and to restraints instead of encouragement imposed on important productive sectors.
To be specific, it will be impossible for private industry to bear, as contemplated in the Fourth Plan, 40% of the burden of the country’s further industrial development if it continues to be hamstrung by the present straitjacket of regulations, controls and restrictions which will be further extended and tightened in the near future if legislative enactments at present before Parliament, and proposals such as contained in the Dutt Committee Report, are implemented.
It is to me one of the most tragic features of India’s economic history since Independence that, having wisely chosen a mixed economy as the pattern for industrial development most appropriate to its needs, our rulers and legislators then took over the years every possible step, in the name of socialism, to impede the effective functioning of one of its two basic elements.
The Private Sector has today reached a stage of development and expertise where it can make a massive contribution to the country’s further economic development.
The vast majority of India’s entrepreneurs, large and small, are patriotic and socially conscious men who do not ask for special favours or large profits, nor seek monopoly or any concentration of wealth and power.
All they want are the opportunities to exercise their initiative and skills to apply their resources for the country’s benefit as well as that of their shareholders, labour and customers and, above all, to be allowed to get on with the job.