Development Theories and India’s Record

Abstract

We have now completed our overview of the government and politics of India. It is time to put Indian politics in the context of general debates on the meaning and conditions of development. The conceptual vocabulary of development studies is profoundly rooted in the historical encounter between the European and the non-European. Is tradition necessarily an obstacle to progress and development which must be discarded? Is modernisation necessarily all good? How much conceptual coherence is there to the term ‘Third World’? The abundance of terms to refer essentially to the same group of countries reflects continuing dissatisfactions with each: backward, developing, undeveloped, underdeveloped, less developed, Third World, low income, traditional. In these days of political correctness, perhaps we should call them ‘the economically challenged’ or ‘the industrially embarrassed’.