Structure and Technical Change in the Large- scale Machine Tool Industry in India: 1950–1980

There is a whiff of nostalgia today about the debates related to industrialisation that occurred in India in the fifties. Its bolder versions suggested not accepting an unequal international division of labour that condemned developing countries to being hewers of wood and drawers of water and advocated the ‘forced diffusion’ of technologies and industries that did not necessarily accord with India’s capital–labour ratios. As a host of economies broke free of the shackles of colonisation by the early fifties, industrialisation recommended itself as the natural strategy for structural transformation.