Economist With Ear To The Ground

The doyen of agricultural economics in India, Prof M L Dantwala, has passed away at the age of 89. He had a strong ideological influence on the country's agro-economic policy formulation for several decades preceding the economic reforms.

Born in Surat into a family that had traditionally dealt in ivory, Mohanlal Lalloobhai Dantwala was viewed by his colleagues and the political leadership as a development economist who seldom lost sight of ground realities despite his distinct Marxist leanings. The influence of Mahatma Gandhi as well as socialists like Jayaprakash Narayan with whom he had close contacts was visible in his economic thinking.

 

However, his insight into poverty, unemployment and other dilemmas of growth made him take a holistic view of the development process and move with time without, of course, ignoring the main concern of socialists: safeguarding the interests of the downtrodden.

Dantwala came in contact with leaders of the Indian National Congress and young socialists at an early age when his studies at the Bombay School of Economics and Sociology for a masters degree were interrupted due to his arrest for participation in the freedom movement. In fact, he wrote a part of his thesis in the Arthur Road prison in Bombay where he was detained as an under-trial. The two-and-a-half years of prison term provided him time to study the egalitarian ideology of Marx. He later became a founder member of the Congress Socialist Party.

Not many people remember now that Mahatma Gandhi had once toyed with the idea of promoting the concept of "trusteeship of wealth" as an independent ideology, something between capitalism and socialism, and Dantwala was associated with the process of fine-tuning this philosophy.

Described by Gandhi as "equalitarianism", this novel thought had essentially sought to let the wealthy people make more wealth but without the right to squander it for their own pleasure or comfort, disregarding their duties towards society.

Dantwala knew, and said it in one of the papers written by him, that a socialist society cannot become a reality until a majority of the people, particularly the elite, accept the ethical basis of such a society. "Merely building an economy modelled on the socialist doctrine _ public ownership of productive assets _ is no guarantee that it will user in an enduring egalitarian society", he said.

He had the courage of going against the tide when, soon after the green revolution of the mid-1960s, many eminent economists jumped to the conclusion that it was merely a "palace revolt', a "short-lived wonder" or contained the "seeds of disaster".

Dantwala boldly contradicted them, saying the green revolution was "the reward of scientific research and not of the wisdom of economists".

Later, he played a significant role in strengthening the foundation of the green revolution through policy guidance as the first chairman of the Agricultural Prices Commission.

He had also been a member of the Congress' agrarian reforms committee and the foodgrains policy committee of the government, besides being the chairman of the review committee on pilot intensive rural employment projects.

Dantwala, who was awarded the Padma Bhushan, provided able stewardship to the Indian Society of Agricultural Economics for a long time and presided over the all-India agricultural economics conference in 1970. He served as the chairman of the governing council of the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, besides being the head of the Bombay University's department of economics. He was also a member of the Second Pay Commission (1957-59). He resigned from the board of directors of the Reserve Bank in protest against the declaration of emergency in 1975.

Dantwala authored over a dozen books and wrote nearly 200 papers. He also guided scores of students in their post-graduate degree courses.