68 SOCIAL SCIENTIST text then pravailing, were the improvements in the manufacture of cables and insulation. The picture that emerges is one of incremental advances in a host of mutually supportive industries, each impacting on the others through complex derived demand and supply effects. The necessary preconditions for the "take-off of the electricity industry were the development of the supply sector to provide it with the requisite operational hardware, and the emergence of the demand sectors for its output. The demand arose both from other industries (as in the telegraph, electroplating, traction, fixed motive power, electrochemistry and electrometallurgy applications), as well a^the mass of consumers. In its growth, beginning from the last quarter of the 19th century, the electricity industry was closely allied with two others—steel and machine tools. The electricity-steel-machine tools linkage constituted the foundation of the industrial ascendancy of the USA and Germany in this period, while the pioneer industrialiser, Britain, remained wedded to the archaic steam power-iron pattern. The full consequences were felt by Britain after World War I, when she had to drop all pretensions of liberalism, and resort to massive State sponsorship in the more technology-intensive branches of industry. And in the older industries, which were beginning to feel the drag of technological obsolescence, this period saw the advent of a wave of concentration, that reduced a multiplicity of enterprises to a mere handful. (Hobsbawm, 1969, pp. 207-24). All these developments undoubtedly, had their influence on J.D. Bemal, as did the resurgent British trade union movement of the time, which sought to forge an alternate view of politics in the crucible of the depressed 1930s. By far the more significant influence, however, was the experience of the Soviet Union, with all its apparent signs of progress under the dispensation of economic planning, and its immunity to the downturn in the world capitalist economy. The technological content of the Soviet planning exercise may, without grave risk of caricature, be expressed as the recreation of the steel-electricity-machine tools linkage that had been the core of the second phase of industrialisation in Europe. The fair measure of success that the Soviet Union had had in this endeavour, was to prove of particular interest to the newly independent countries in the post-World War II context of decolonisation. India was one of the countries to introduce a significant programme of economic planning in this context, with several analogues to the Soviet experience. This paper is an attempt to review certain aspects of the economic models used in the Indian planning exercise, with particular reference to what they have to say on the process of diffusion and adoption of technology. The epithet "physicalisf is applied to these models with certain reservations. In the realm of the philosophy of science, there is a viewpoint that all natural phenomena are expressible in terms of the language of physics. According to this, the physicalist doctrine, even an individual, subjective experience—such as an act of perception—can be expressed in terms of an