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Planning, Poverty and Political Economy of Reforms: A Tribute to Suresh D. Tendulkar

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Perspectives on Economic Development and Policy in India

Part of the book series: India Studies in Business and Economics ((ISBE))

Abstract

This paper pays tribute to Professor Suresh D. Tendulkar’s contribution and scholarship to economics, economic-policy making, and economic reforms in India. The paper’s scope is by no means exhaustive, and primarily focuses on his contributions on economic planning in India, the political economy of economic reforms, and his important conceptual and policy-relevant work on poverty measurement. The paper also presents results on empirical exercises comparing trends in inequality, and various poverty lines in India in the recent past. The paper concludes with policy observations on economic reforms in India, and directions for further empirical research on poverty.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In fact a society for which a plan for a finite horizon is being considered not only will almost surely exist in the future beyond the finite horizon, but will be aware of this fact also. For this reason, reflecting future in some way in the finite horizon models is done. This problem was well understood in the literature in the sixties. One procedure was to make the finite horizon endogenous as the time needed to move the economy from the initial period to a steady state growth path. The objective of such models was to minimize the time needed. The target steady state of some of the models was the so-called von Neumann model of steady state growth. The seminal Turnpike Theorem of Samuelson and Solow that showed, as long as the finite time horizon was sufficiently long, any efficient path from given initial and target economic states would spend a large part of its horizon close to the von Neumann path was very influential. My dissertation (Srinivasan 1962) was of this genre of models.

  2. 2.

    Contemporary macroeconomic modellers would recognise that the analytical trade-offs that Suresh recognised more than four decades ago have their modern counterpart in those between aggregate—single-representative-agent based dynamic-stochastic-general-equilibrium (DSGE) models and versions of multiagent models.

  3. 3.

    Suresh joined others at DSE such as Pranab Bardhan and Mrinal Datta Chaudhuri, who had left ISI earlier. In my perspective as an ISI-Mahalanobis loyalist I used to call them in jest as “traitors”.

  4. 4.

    I would like to express my gratitude to Professors Tendulkar and Bhavani for mentioning me along with my friends and collaborators, Manmohan Singh, Jagdish Bhagwati and late P.N. Dhar; labeling all of us as ‘long-time reformers by conviction’.

  5. 5.

    I am greatly indebted to Mr. K.L. Datta, Consultant in the Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India, for letting me see Chap. 2 on The Methodology of Poverty Measurement from his forth coming untitled book analysing Poverty Measurement and Policy in India (Datta, forthcoming). My email exchanges with him and the chapter were very helpful in clarifying the changes in poverty measurement by the Planning Commission and also evaluation of the changes made (as well as needed and not yet made) by independent scholars.

  6. 6.

    The eminent statisticians, late Professor P.V. Sukhatme (1911–1997), in several papers stressed the importance of allowing for intra and inter individual variation in energy intakes around a requirement, defined as long term averages. He had argued that not doing so in identifying all individuals whose energy intakes below the average requirements for the population as a whole as necessarily undernourished would lead to erroneous estimation of the share of undernourished in a population and by the same token erroneous estimate of the poverty ratio in a population using a poverty line anchored at the average energy requirement for a population. See Srinivasan (1992) and Sukhatme (1982).

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Professor Vaidyanathan for his useful and critical comments on an earlier version of this paper. I would like to thank Professor V. Pandit, Professor K.L. Krishna, Professor K. Sundaram and Professor Pami Dua for their many constructive suggestions in revising the paper. My sincere thanks to Mr Azad Singh Bali for his painstaking research assistance and to Cody Eckert for administrative assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Economic Growth Center, Yale University, 27 Hillhouse Avenue, P.O. Box 208269, New Haven, CT, 06520-8269, USA

    T. N. Srinivasan

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  1. T. N. Srinivasan
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Correspondence to T. N. Srinivasan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Madras Institute of Development Studies , Chennai, India

    K.L. Krishna

  2. Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning , Puttaparthi, Andhra Pradesh, India

    Vishwanath Pandit

  3. Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics (DSE), New Delhi, India

    K. Sundaram

  4. Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India

    Pami Dua

Appendix

Appendix

List of Acronyms

AGEM:

Applied general equilibrium model

CGEM:

Computable general equilibrium model

CSO:

Central statistical office

GDE:

Gross domestic expenditure

GDP:

Gross domestic product

GNP:

Gross national product

ISI:

Indian Statistical Institute

MP:

Marginal productivity

NAS:

National account statistics

NSO:

National statistical office

NSS:

National sample survey

NSSO:

National Sample Survey Organization

PC:

Planning Commission

PL:

Poverty line

PLB:

Poverty line basket

PU:

Planning Unit

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Srinivasan, T.N. (2017). Planning, Poverty and Political Economy of Reforms: A Tribute to Suresh D. Tendulkar. In: Krishna, K., Pandit, V., Sundaram, K., Dua, P. (eds) Perspectives on Economic Development and Policy in India. India Studies in Business and Economics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3150-2_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3150-2_1

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