BOOK REVIEW 59 fifties has not been 'unimpressive' in terms of number of factories, the share of manufacturing sector in gross domestic product, the growing role of the public sector (especially, in the basic and capital goods) and yet there is disturbing evidence that stagnation and sickness have set in in many industries. He only hints at .the lack of resilience in industry and of the development as yet of 'an industrial culture'. A. K. Bagchi surveys the constraints operative mainly on the factory sector and presents a critique of alternative hypotheses offered for the slow pace of industrial growth. He refutes, with supportive evidence, the hypothesis that the supply of finance has been an effective constraint on the expansion of industry. In fact, with a number of publicly created institutions facilitating the extension of credit and its provisioning on easy terms, business firms have come to depend substantially on term lending institutions rather than on internal financing or on share capital issues. This fact, the tardy growth of the share market, is also noticed by Dalal and Lahiri. Bagchi notes, of course, the discrimination involved in the access to such credit avenues and the favourable position of large business houses as well as the inter-regional differences in credit dispensations. But his real emphasis is on the constraint on the home market. He sees the root of the malady plaguing Indian industrialisation since 1950 in the extreme inequality of incomes. The failure of Indian capitalists to invest productively the surplus value they appropriate is seen to arise primarily from the monopolistic practices of the ruling capitalists and landlord classes. The extremely high rates of surplus value arise from, and in turn reinforce, the extreme inequities in property ownership. Though public investment and import substitution gave an initial impetus to industry in the post-independence years, the development was geared mainly to generate incomes in upper ranges. The concentration of incomes in the higher ranges did create demand for consumer durables but this was neither steady nor substantially large. This fact, coupled with the bias towards import of technology which is capital- and import-intensive, slowed down generally the growth of employment and incomes, in turn restricting demand growth (Bagchi elaborates the growing technological dependence, providing a number of illustrations). Bagchi argues that public sector expenditure, usually considered as a deus ex machina to solve the problem of industrial retrogression, itself suffers from 'the structure of Indian society'. In fact, he argues that a redistribution of incomes and economic decision-making power towards the poorer sections of the population is a pre-condition for an unfettered growth of public sector itself. He, accordingly, prescribes reliance on indigenous technology, decentralisation of decision-making, public accountability and rules enforcing on the public sector greater use of labour-intensive techniques and a shift towards the production of mass consumption goods.