BOOK REVIEW Review Article A Soviet Academician on Industrial Development in India GK SHIROKOV, INDUSTRIALIZATION OF INDIA, Problems of the Third World Series, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1973y pp 326, Rs 4.60 WHAT characterizes this wide-ranging study by a Soviet economist is the tension between the tendency that emerges from the economic analysis^ and the apologetic and absurd theoretical and political conclusions. The tendency that emerges from the analysis comes in the line of an earlier generation of pioneering Soviet studies of economic development in modern India by Reisner, Pavlov, Goldberg, Melman and other Soviet scholars. The formal conclusions are dictated by the ideological-political position of modern revisionism in relation to India. This review will not attempt to summarize the very interesting empirical material presented in this book which must be evaluated in detail. It will merely take up the two aspects of the study and see how the conclusions and the tendency are irreconcilable. TENDENCT The tendency that emerges from Shirokov's painstaking and detailed economic analysis shows that the industrialization of India is backward, uneven and distorted; that the plans for industrialization and economic development have failed; that monopolies and big capital have grown at the expense of the people; that the dependence on foreign finance capital has been significant and has increased; and that the economic situation has worsened, and will continue to worsen, at a pace alarming for the rulers. Shirokov's economic analysis, based on a wealth of primary and secondary economic material and on his own field investigation stresses the following aspects.