124 SOCIAL SCIENTIST increase to the owners of capital and an intensifying concentration of wealth in fewer hands—all these under a socialist mask—indicate clearly the direction in which Indian plans are heading. While the plums of development have gone to the bourgeoisie and their allies the problems of the working masses have been aggravated. While socialist countries have insulated their planning from the crisis of world capitalism, the experience of India has been the reverse: recurring explosions outside have rocked the economy to its foundations. Poverty and unemployment, deprivation of medical, educational and housing facilities, all these have worsened over the period of planning. E M S has brought out the analogy of Indian development with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea where, against much heavier odds, the progress achieved has been phenomenal. Korea has been genuinely and firmly put on the path of socialist development and considerable ground has been covered to solve the basic problems of a hitherto underdeveloped economy. The success story of Korea is not an isolated instance: it is equally applicable to all socialist economies, from war-torn Vietnam to the Peoples' Republic of China and the Soviet Union. It should be remembered that the crisis in Indian planning is a crisis for the working cla^s alone. The entire benefit has gone to the bourgeoisie and its allies who are in collaboration with world monopoly capitalism. Alternative Policies: Basis for Discussion The author has reiterated the alternative policies proposed by the undivided Communist Party of India in 1956 for a minimum programme of national reconstruction as well as the alternative policies for the Fourth Five Year Plan formulated at the Seminar organized by the State Planning Board ofKerala in 1968. It is contended that adoption of these alternatives alone can solve the basic problems of the economy in the face of failure and futility of ruling-class policies. Adoption of the alternative proposals would sound the knell of the Indian national bourgeoisie and its allies. It is too much to expect that it would voluntarily give up its entrenched positions and surrender its interests to the working class. The automatic rejection of the alternatives by the ruling class without even giving them any serious consideration is therefore quite understandable. Beyond reaffirming the class character of India's economic planning, such exercises have only an academic interest and certainly not even the planners would seriously think that the adoption of these policies is at least a remote possibility in the existing economic-political power structure. Namboodiripad has been able to tear down the socialist garb of Indian planning and bring into the open its real content: the protection and furtherance of the class interests of Indian bourgeoisie and their allies as also of foreign monopoly capital. It would therefore be correct to say that planning in India has become utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of the country^? population,