CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
India and Appropriate Technology
“THE BIG MISTAKE GANDHI made was to advocate the spinning wheel,” said one influential Indian government economist. “It’s much too efficient. With the unemployment and underemployment we have in our villages the truly appropriate technology is the hand-held spindle, the spinning whorl.” Yet this is hardly how the Indian villagers define “appropriate technology” for themselves.
What struck me most when traveling in the winter of 1978–79 for six weeks through rural India was not the pervasive poverty or the palpable unemployment; I had expected both. What I had not expected, however, were the four or five brand-new bicycles standing outside every one of the miserable hovels—and not one of them chained or locked. There may still be more bullock carts in rural India than bicycles; there surely are still infinitely more bullock carts than there are small tractors. But what powers India’s Green Revolution, what has given the subcontinent a food surplus for the first time in its thousands of years, is not the digging stick or the wooden plow. It is the ubiquitous gasoline pump in the tub well and the irrigation ditch of an arid land.
From every bullock cart, every camel cart, every pedicab, and every howdah on the back of an elephant there issue the strains of the transistor radio. And the most crowded stand in every one of the countless village markets is the one that sells motor scooters on the installment plan.
Much as it pains the Indian government economist and his boss, the Prime Minister, the bicycle, transistor radio, gasoline pump, and motor scooter—rather than the spinning wheel, let alone the distaff or the spinning whorl—are indeed the appropriate technology for India and for most developing countries. They create jobs and purchasing power—the distaff would destroy both.
No one in India could tell me what the economic policy of the government is. The only governmental actions are expansion of already large government enterprises, unchecked growth of an already obese bureaucracy, and more bureaucratic regulations. The cabinet cannot agree on anything and has no policy whatever. Substantial sums are being allocated to the villages but without programs, let alone goals. But there is a pervasive rhetoric of smallness and of antitechnology.
India’s Prime Minister at the time of my trip (i.e., before Mrs. Gandhi’s return to power), Morarji Desai, eighty-four years old but looking fifty-five (which he attributes to his eating only raw mashed vegetables and drinking his own urine), preached to me “small is beautiful,” “rural development,” and “appropriate [that is, preindustrial] technology.” It is this rhetoric that his economic adviser echoes when he counsels a return to the spinning whorl. And pretty much the same rhetoric can now be heard in many developing countries, for example in Indonesia or from the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran. It is very much the same rhetoric that underlay the disastrous Great Leap Forward in Maoist China twenty years ago, with its emphasis on the village and on backyard steel furnaces.
As a reaction to the delusion of “the bigger the better,” which enthralled earlier Indian governments, especially Nehru, Desai’s emphasis on rural India was overdue. Earlier governments neglected the village, where 90 percent of India’s 550 million people still live. But “small is beautiful” is just as much a delusion as “the bigger the better.” What is appropriate is not what uses the most capital or the most labor; it is not what is “small” or “big,” “preindustrial” or a “scientific marvel.” What is appropriate is quite simply what makes the economy’s resources most productive. What is appropriate in a country of huge population and rapid population growth is what multiplies productive jobs. What is development in a country which like India has sizable resources of managerial and entrepreneurial skill and at the same time huge unfulfilled consumer needs is whatever creates purchasing power.
Steel mills, those prestige investments of the 1960s into which earlier Indian governments poured very large chunks of the country’s scarce capital resources, are becoming the white elephants of the 1970s and 1980s. Steel mills are inappropriate technology for a country like India. They are highly capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive. They supply a commodity which is in ample supply on the world market and available everywhere at a low price. Above all, they create practically no jobs beyond those in the mill itself.
But the automotive industry—passenger cars, motorbikes, trucks, and tractors—is probably the most efficient multiplier of jobs around. Its own plants have a fairly high ratio of labor to capital, and the industry generates about four to five secondary or tertiary jobs throughout the economy for every one in the manufacturing plant. It creates jobs in road building and road maintenance, in traffic control, in dealerships, service stations, and repair work. And it creates enormous purchasing power with these jobs.
Similarly, making transistor radios and bicycles requires both a large manufacturing base and a large dealer system; and both multiply jobs and create purchasing power. And like the automotive industry, both create human capital, that is, skills accessible to the unlearned. The same might be said for the manufacture of synthetic fertilizer or pharmaceuticals or pesticides—all require big enterprises and national distribution and service (moreover, these products, together with the gasoline pump, underlie the two great successes of India since independence: the rapid increase in food production and the rapid decrease in infant mortality).
Equally appropriate as a creator of productivity, jobs, and purchasing power is the cosmetics manufacturer, who may be quite small. I saw a highly efficient and highly successful multinational cosmetics firm in Bangalore which, with twenty employees, produces five times as much foreign exchange per rupee of investment or sales as any of the huge state-owned Indian enterprises.
The development decades of the fifties and sixties worshiped capital investment. The best testament to this superstition is The Stages of Economic Growth , which Walt W. Rostow, later President Johnson’s foreign policy adviser, wrote in the early 1960s and which then became the bible of the developing countries. Mr. Rostow proclaimed that development is an automatic and direct function of the size of capital investment. But that is not productivity; it’s waste and incompetence. Today there is a tendency to define productivity as whatever uses the most labor—especially in the developing countries, with their huge, unemployed, young population.
But that, too, is incompetence. Productivity is whatever generates the highest overall yield from an economy’s resources of capital, labor, physical resources, and time. This will also give the largest number of jobs and the maximum purchasing power. It will even produce the lowest possible inequality in the distribution of incomes attainable at a given stage of economic development. And surely poor countries cannot afford to support unproductive people—that is, people who appear busy winding a few strands of cotton around a wooden staff. Rich countries may be able to keep unproductive people gainfully unemployed, but poor countries have no surplus to distribute.
Above all, the troubadours of “small is beautiful” forget—as does so much of official Washington—that a healthy economy and society need both the large and the small. Indeed, the two are interdependent in both a developed and developing country. There can be no small manufacturer in a large market—whether that of the United States or of India—unless there is a large assembler or a large retailer, an IBM, a GM, a Sears Roebuck. It is only in their products or their stores that the small man’s output can reach the market. But there would also be no GM except for the existence of a multitude of small autonomous tool-and-die shops and a host of small parts suppliers, or local dealers, service stations, and repair shops.
Pharmaceutical research requires big—if not very big—enterprises. But pharmaceutical sales depend on some 200,000 drugstores and 200,000 physicians—each of necessity decentralized and indeed autonomous. Rural development in India not only means national marketing organizations for village products and national credit and banking institutions. It means huge power stations. Above all—something the advocates of “small is beautiful” always conveniently overlook—it means centralized government bureaucracies, which surely could not be called “small” whether or not they deserve to be called “beautiful.”
None of these arguments, I am afraid, made much impact on the Indian government economist—nor, I realized, would they have made much impact on his Prime Minister. But once Indians have the bicycle, the motor scooter, the transistor radio, and the gasoline pumps, are they really going to go back to the spinning whorl?
(1979)