Discuss the social consequences of economic development in India. Do you share the view that it has increased economic inequality and failed to promote social justice? (1984)
Planned development after 1947 and market-led growth after 1991 have transformed India’s social structure rather than merely its output. The sociological question is whether that transformation redistributed opportunity or concentrated it. The evidence supports a divided verdict: inequality has clearly widened, while social justice has advanced unevenly rather than failed outright.
Social consequences: new structures, new actors
- Agrarian differentiation. The Green Revolution raised output but required irrigation, credit and scale that small holders lacked. It produced a stratum of capitalist farmers in Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and coastal Andhra, pushed sharecroppers into wage labour, and, as P. C. Joshi argued, converted latent discontent in an outmoded agrarian structure into manifest agrarian tension. T. K. Oommen warned that such growth does not reach the agrarian poor without structural change at the grass roots.
- New classes and the political turn of dominant castes. Prosperous cultivating castes organised to secure subsidies and state support, giving rural India a regionally rooted middle class with its own parties.
- Urbanisation and informality. Industrial and service growth has drawn migrants into cities without absorbing them into secure employment; the overwhelming share of the workforce remains informal, a reality Jan Breman captured in his account of footloose labour.
- A new middle class. Liberalisation after 1991 produced a consumption-defined middle class, which Pavan K. Varma criticised for a decline in social responsibility. Alongside it, reservation and urban employment created a Dalit and Backward Class middle class, part of what Christophe Jaffrelot called a silent revolution.
Has inequality increased?
- Yes, and measurably. Estimates by the World Inequality Lab for 2022-23 place the top 1 per cent of Indians at about 22.6 per cent of national income and 40.1 per cent of personal wealth — among the highest concentrations recorded anywhere and higher than in the colonial period.
- Growth has also been regionally and sectorally uneven, with western and southern states pulling away, and employment growth lagging output growth.
- A. R. Desai anticipated this: a state-assisted capitalist path would enlarge the surplus while leaving property relations, and therefore the distribution, intact.
Has social justice failed?
- Not entirely. Absolute deprivation has fallen sharply on multidimensional measures, life expectancy and school enrolment have risen, and affirmative action has produced genuine political and bureaucratic representation for groups once excluded by ritual rule.
- But Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, in An Uncertain Glory (2013), argue that India’s failure lies in converting growth into public services — health, education, nutrition — on which substantive equality depends.
- Social justice has been delivered mainly as recognition and representation, far less as redistribution: land reform stalled, and caste-linked assetlessness survives.
Conclusion
I share the first half of the view and qualify the second. Development has concentrated income and wealth while dispersing political voice. Justice defined as dignity and representation has advanced; justice defined as material redistribution has not — and until growth is coupled to assets and public provision, the two will keep moving in opposite directions.