SEVENTH FIVE YEAR PLAN 57
its true character. According to the Approach paper, "tax collection -can be raised even without raising rates by widening the tax net and toning up the administration". Shorn of its outer trappings, this amounts to an explicit acknowledgement of the lack of will and inability to mobilise resources through taxing the rich. This implies that there would be contiued reliance for resource mobilisation on the existing tax sturcture, with its emphasis on indirect taxes, which has inflationary and hence inegalitarian consequences.
The Approach paper goes on to enumerate "strict controls on government consumption expenditure, restraints on elitist consumption, mobilisation of resources from the rural sector and incentives for savings" as some of the other measures needed for resource mobilisation. On this question, the Approach paper seems to have abstracted from the concrete setting in which the Seventh Plan has to operate. Any curbing of elitist consumption in this country would require a quantitative and qualitative increase in the extent of direct controls. It is, however, apparent to even the most superficial observer of the Indian economic scenie that there has been both a quantitative and qualitative increase in the extent of decontrols over the last decade. As to how this apparent contradiction is to be resolved is not very clear.
Let us now consider the question of agriculture, on which the Approach paper lays so much emphasis. It has been envisaged that agricultural production is to grow at 4 per cent per annum and foodgrain production at 5 per cent during the Seventh Plan. This, according to the Approach paper, is to be achieved through greater emphasis on "neglected crops, neglected areas, investment in irrigation, credit, agricultural research etc". No serious attempts at land reforms are envisaged because according to the Approach paper, "substantial progress has already been made in implementing land reforms". This is in spite of the fact that less than -p1 of the potential land surplus estimated by the Planning Commission in 1978 has been redistributed till date.
The experience of the Green Revolution has already demonstrated that an exclusive emphasis on irrigation, credit and other technical factors, to the complete exclusion of land reforms cannot lead to any sustained increase in agricultural production. Also, it is not as if the strategy of the Green Revolution was not tried for "neglected crops" and "neglected areas." Their so-called "reglect" is because of technical and institutional constraint which prevented this strategy from succeeding. There seems to be no reason why a revival of this strategy in the Seventh Plan should lead to sustained high rates of growth in agriculture.
As far as industry is concerned, a 7 per cent annual rate of growth is envisaged during the Seventh Plan. This 7 per cent rate of growth, according to the Approach paper, depends crucially upon securing a high rate of growth in agriculture. If there is no logical reason why the rates of growth in agriculture should increase during the