In a society where there is large scale unemployment and underemployment, the creation of new employment opportunities on a large enough scale can make a major contribution in both accelerating the pace of development as well as in promoting greater social justice. Here again, one has to guard against the complacent view that higher growth rates by themselves will be able to resolve the problem of unemployment and under-employment. Experience shows that a high rate of economic growth, although often a necessary condition, is not a sufficient condition for generating new job opportunities on large enough scale. Although the development of basic industries — steel, fertilisers, petro-chemicals, machine-building capacity — is essential for our future growth as well as for greater self-reliance, one has to recognise that modern large-scale industry is often highly capital-intensive, and as such does not offer adequate scope for speedy absorption of available surplus labour. In part, this reflects the fact that our development so far has largely been based on imported technology, a technology evolved in developed countries with an eye on their factor endowments. Unlike developing countries, developed countries are characterised by a relative shortage of labour and plentiful supplies of capital. As a result, technological development in Western countries has a strong bias in favour of labour-saving and capital using techniques. When this technology is transplanted to developing countries, it is not surprising that it makes very small contribution to the solution of the chronic problem of unemployment. It, therefore, appears that in the interest of both greater efficiency in resource use as well as generation of greater employment opportunities, the development of a suitable intermediate technology which would be more responsive to the needs of developing countries must receive a high priority in planning our programmes for scientific and industrial research. At the same time, the potential offered by small-scale and village industries must be fully exploited. Moreover, one has to recognise that for quite some time to come, the employment potential offered by the urban industrial sector is likely to remain limited. As such, every effort must be made to find new productive job opportunities within agriculture. In the last few years, we have launched a number of employment-oriented programmes for creating new job opportunities in rural areas. I must confess, our past experience with the rural works programme is not entirely satisfactory. There have been important gaps in organisation and implementation. In part, this is due to deficiencies in our administrative structure. The administrator in his new capacity has to act as a planner, promoter, organiser, coordinator and evaluator — all in one. Despite major efforts to bring our administrative structure in line with new developmental responsibilities of the State, there is obviously need for further improvement. At the same time, we need to enlarge the scope for mass participation in development activity, to encourage through democratic decentralisation new levels of initiative among the people and to reduce public dependence on bureaucracy as a source of impetus for social change.
