The Nehru–Mahalanobis Strategy

One’s interpretation of the Nehruvian economic strategy (or the Nehru–  Mahalanobis strategy as economist Sukhamoy Chakravarty [1987] had called it) depends naturally upon one’s conceptual framework; and it need not even coincide with that of the framers of the strategy. It is perfectly possible, in other words, to see the content of the Nehru–Mahalanobis strategy very differently from the way that even Nehru or Mahalanobis saw it. In what follows I wish to use a conceptual framework for interpreting the Nehru–Mahalanobis strategy that is altogether different from what has been commonly used by its authors, critics and defenders alike, and argue that the strategy as interpreted on the basis of this alternative framework constitutes, to this day, the core of any genuine anti imperialist and pro-people development strategy in an economy like ours.