Appropriate Technology—A Strategy for Economic Growth in the Third World

Industrial growth has been one of the major planks of the development programmes of most countries of the Third World. Although most of these countries are agriculturally oriented, there has been, often, an undue emphasis in their development plans on the growth of industry, particularly in the large scale sector. Steel mills, fertilizer plants and oil refineries have become status symbols for most of the developing countries, and a large portion of developmental aid from the industrialized countries is earmarked for the same purpose. Despite all this the actual rate of growth of industry in most countries has been comparatively poor. The ILO has estimated that in the seventies almost 200 million people will enter, for the first time, the labour force in these countries, but barely 10 per cent of them are likely to find employment opportunities in the organized industrial sector. Thus, even in providing low-grade employment, the pattern of industrial growth, as practiced in the developing countries, has not yielded significant results. True, there have been a few success stories such as in Hongkong or Singapore, but these are isolated instances with special characteristics and with very small populations. Others who have done relatively well are Korea and Taiwan both of which have had access to large amounts of foreign assistance in the post-war world. The rest of the Third World in Asia, Africa and Latin America has barely managed, relatively speaking, to keep at the same levels of industrialization as in the past; in some cases, they have even tended to slip below the level. India which at the time of World War II was rated the eighth largest industrialized nation in the world, today, ranks lower in spite of the massive development programmes it has undertaken in the last twenty five years. Even more than the absolute quantum is the fact that what little growth has taken place has been largely confined to the urban metropolitan areas and there has been little or no 'diffusion' to the rural areas. The once tacit assumption that prosperity will automatically perco late does not seem to have occurred in practice.