FIVE YEAR PLAN 75 go for the Rolling Plan legitimizes and accelerates a process already well under way. The growth—industrial and agricultural — that has taken place has failed to solve the basic problems of our people. On the contrary, unemployment has steadily increased and has now reached staggering proportions; the percentage of population below the so-called poverty line has steadily increased; and sharp inflationary trends of 1966-74 are once again coming to the fore. Despite handsome concessions by both the previous and the present regime to foreign and domestic monopoly capital, the stagnation in investment persists* The crisis of our bourgeois landlord economy has deepened over the years. The attendant failure to solve the basic economic problems of our people has inevitably led to a political crisis as well. This political crisis which first found its sharpest expression in the Emergency is also deepening steadily, a fact to which the increasing conflicts and contradictions among the bourgeois landlord parties bear witness. Once again the tide of mass struggles is rising. It is in this context—of severe economic and political crisis—that the Draft Sixth Five Year Plan, which on the face of it admits past failures, and proclaims an allegedly "new" alternative development strategy, must be analysed. The^discussions in the three groups—Industry, Agriculture and Science and Technology—took place based on such recognition on the part of a large number of pariticipants. INDUSTRY It is well known that the Indian economy in general, and the Indian industry in particular, have t^en in a state of crisis for over a decade now. The initial pha^e of rapid industrial growth in the post-Independence period has been followed by ^stagnation in industrial output, investment and employment since the mid-sixtie5. Such industrial growth as has taken place has benefited a narrow stratum, and has led to increased (fencentration of economic power. This period has also witnessed tne increasing penetration of the Indian economy by foreign capital. This crisis of the Indian economy is the direct product of the capitalist pattern of development, and has in fact deepened over the last several years. The draft plan document recognizes both the lopsided character of the pattern of industrial development, and the stagnation that has characterised this sector. No New Strategy However, the document not only fails to provide a proper