POLITICAL ECONOMY AND DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS 125
infrastructure in this vital sector are emphasised—leads Bardhan on to well-trodden, if still dangerous territory : the causes of industrial deceleration in the Indian economy since the mid-sixties. As is well known, this still inconclusive debate has engaged some of the best minds working on the Indian economy, and a number of competing views have crystallised.1 Thus while neoclassical economists have by and large blamed the inefficiencies associated with the regime of controls for the secular decline in the rate of industrial growth, others have variously focused on the failure of agriculture to grow at a sufficient pace, on the impact of adverse terms of trade for industry, on the decline of public investment, on the deteriorating productivity of capital and on the worsening pattern of income distribution —to mention only the major hypotheses that one finds in the literature.2
Bardhan is clearly aware of the range in this debate. He does note the limitations of some explanations of the deceleration (e.g. those tha^t invoke a worsening in levels of inequality, or attempt to find a link with the end of the era of import substitution) and statistical back-up for his arguments is provided in the score of tables gathered together at the end of the book. But in trying to establish that the culprit ultimately is the combination of decline in investment levels and the increasing inefficiency of capital use, he really cannot hope to convince anyone who has not already been convinced through an independent reading of the evidence. Perhaps because of the inherent limitations imposed by a lecture format, the text makes important claims without adequate substantiation, and these often emerge incompletely in footnotes (e.g. the results of econometric exercises which show the stimulating effect—and little 'crowding out'—of public sector investment on private sector economic activity, or the evidence that the increase in capital-output ratios can be clearly linked to cost escalation and 'irresponsible political decision-making')—and one gets the impression that Bardhan is rather eager to establish his case and pass on, as he puts it, "from the world of economic statistics to that of political sociology" for this explanation does as it happens fit in rather nicely with a theory of state power in India that is exposited in the next couple of
chapters.
This theory—possibly the most innovative, if controversial, part of
the book—takes as its starting point the work of the political sociologist Theda Skocpol [1979, 1982] and in particular her well-known analyses of the mechanisms and apparatus of state power and control. Bardhan argues that the Indian state has to be seen as a 'relatively autonomous' regulatory (and hence patronage dispensing) agent than as a more familiar development one. He then identifies three dominant 'proprietary classes' who have managed in the Indian context to appropriate the institutions of state power and in whose interests the mechanisms of state therefore largely operate. Each of these classes has a measure of clout to direct part of the operations of sWe to its own advantage, but differences amongst the