62 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
not only to wipe out the deficit but also to finance the loan's repayment. This of course raises two further questions: What are the underlying structural reasons for this deficit, and, will the policies being pursued and to be pursued under IMF's "advice" help to wipe out this deficit or only worsen it further ?
Most contributors to this volume tend to believe that given the magnitude of the loan and the likely policies to be pursued, the deficit can hardly be wiped out. If anything, at the end of the three-year period India would be faced with a worse crisis. In his essay, Ranjit Sau ("Roots of the Present Crisis") rightly stresses the need to go back in time and understand the pattern of economic development that has been pursued and the structural basis of the payments deficit before any remedy is suggested. The "roots" go all the way to the mid-sixties, to the disastrous consequences of the 1966 devaluation and import liberalization, the increasing accommodation of foreign capital and dependence on foreign technology, and more so on "oil-intensive" technology—all these resulting in a chronic payments deficit.
This has meant increasing dependence on exports and consequently on external markets. Thus the substitution of "export-led" growth for ''import-snbstitution-led" growth meant a major shift in strategy in the post-independence period, and a pursuit of a new set of policies, which is clearly discernible since the Emergency was promulgated.
What Sau and other authors of this volume have not adequately emphasized is the fact that the pursuit of these policies over the last few years has today enabled the Government of India to argue that what the IMF wants us to do is what we are anyway doing with the consent of "Parliament"! This is a significant point. It is surely important that we reject IMF conditionality but at the same time it is essential that we remember that the policies prescribed by the IMF do not constitute any radical departure from the policies already being pursued by the Indira regime. The retreat from the strategy of "self-reliance", ''import-substitution" and "mixed economy" began much before the IMF entered the picture. What IMF conditionality will now do is to accelerate our movement along this path.
The government's rationale for the loan, inasmuch as it has alluded to the "oil crisis", is questioned by many of the authors. Asim Dasgupta ("An Alternative to the IMF Loan") has suggested what may be considered to be a rather "long-period" solution, namely, a shift away from "oil-intensive" technology to more "appropriate" technology. While he rejects the argument that any really "serious" payments crisis exists, whatever deficit that now exists will only be made worse by the loan deal. Further, the IMF package is designed to "redistribute assets and incomes in favour of the industrial monopolists and the big farmers and at the expense of both workers and the small producers in industry and agriculture" (p 104).