Where has all our plenty gone

I live in a backwater, Calcutta, and read in the newspapers from time to time how New Delhi is exuding confidence about the Indian economy doing wonderfully well during the five-year stretch of the Seventh Plan. The rate of growth seems to have finally breached the notorious Hindu rate of stagnation; it is now stated to be 5 per cent or even more per annum and the Planning Commission along with the Prime Minister—or is it the Prime Minister along with the Planning Commission—are now projecting for a 6 to 8 per cent rate of growth for the Eighth Plan. Wonderful little arithmetic exercises are on. And yet, in the little backwater where I live, uncomfortable questions keep rear ing their head. What is the content of growth we have achieved? Even assuming that the official statistics are correct, what are the components of this 'above 5 per cent' rate of growth? I would put down the three broad components of growth as: (a) agriculture and associate activities; (b) industry; and (c) services, that is, the non-material producing sectors including public administration, defence, commerce, trade, transport, banking,insurance, etc. The newspapers go into raptures over agricultural growth—how, in the course of a single year, a tremendous expansion in output has taken place. For instance in the case of foodgrains, from 132 million tonnes, production has suddenly jumped to 175 million tonnes and, in the next year, it is estimated to be 185 million tonnes. However, if you consider the trend of overall farm output over the past ten years, consider it from peak to peak or trough to trough, you do not really find any fan tastic fate of growth. As against annual rate of population growth of 2.2 per cent, depending on which is your base year and where you end, you will perhaps get a rate of growth of farm output roughly around 2.7 per cent. Therefore, in the overall, there is hardly anything to be terribly excited about. Were you to consider the regional components or the crop