POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ECONOMIC LIBERALISATION 17 Srinivasan and N.S.S. Narayana, "Economic Performance since the Third Plan" in EPW Annual 1977. Most of these authors also see a link between the slowing tempo of public investment and industrial stagnation, though their explanations for this slowing tempo, the relative emphasis they place upon this factor, and the conclusions they derive from it, are widely divergent. 11. Fora discussion of the trends in "real" public investment see R Ramanna*s M. Phil. diserta-. tion (submitted toJNU) on Output Trends in the Capital Goods Industries in India (1984). 12. A comparison of the data provided by the Rural Labour Enquiries (1964-65 and 1974-75) shows that in the country as a whole agricultural labourers experienced a process of absolute impoverishment between these two dates. This is true of each categorty-male, female and children—and arises because of declines in both the number of days employed as well as in the daily real wage-rates. See Utsa Painaik, Thorner.Memorial Lecture. 13. It is sometimes argued that it is not so much the decline in the growth of public investment as the growing inefficiency of the public sector units which is responsible for the industrial slow-down. The corollary is drawn that allowing greater freedom to the private sector would stimulate industrial growth. This from the beginning to the end is an utterly vacuous argument for the following reason : the so-called "inefficiency" of the public sector arisis to a large extent from the same causes as the decline in the growth of its investment, namely that the state is used as an instrument of private enrichment. When the budget is used for this purpose, we observe a fiscal crisis and cut-backs in public investment; when funds are filched from a different Governmental source, namely public sector units, we observe "inefficiency". Thus, both are ultimately linked to the increase in the share of private economic surplus in the country, and cannot be sharply distinguished, one from the other. Moreover, since private enrichment underlies to a great extent the so-called public sector "inefficiency", to argue on the basis of this "inefficiency" for a privatisation of the economy is illogical. The question of "efficiency" in other words is also linked to the class nature of the state; "efficiency" is at its root a class question. 14. See A.K. Bagchi, "Hijacking the Indian Economy", The Herald Review (Bangalore), May 5-11,1985. 15. Seejon Halliday, A Political History of Japanese Capitalism 16. This argument is put forward forcefully in Daniel Guerin's Fascism. 17. See Bhabatosh Datta's article oh the 1985-86 budget entitled "The Greatest Good of the Smallest Number", in The Statesman of March 20, 1985.