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The Great Depression and British Financial Policy in India, 1929-34
... The financial relations were handled by the office of the High Commissioner in India and the political by the office of the Secretary-of-State-in-Council under the British Parliament (Keith, 1961). The financial and fiscal autonomy was prompted by the need for 'foreign' international investment into India from sources outside Britain (Rothermund, 1981Rothermund, –1982 Vani, 1992). These changes were a sequel to the de facto dominion status granted to India in 1919, induction of India into the League of Nations in 1919 and membership in a number of international organisations public and private such as the International Labour Organisation of which India became a founding member. ...
... The financial relations were handled by the office of the High Commissioner in India and the political by the office of the Secretary-of-State-in-Council under the British Parliament (Keith, 1961). The financial and fiscal autonomy was prompted by the need for 'foreign' international investment into India from sources outside Britain (Rothermund, 1981Rothermund, –1982 Vani, 1992). These changes were a sequel to the de facto dominion status granted to India in 1919, induction of India into the League of Nations in 1919 and membership in a number of international organisations public and private such as the International Labour Organisation of which India became a founding member. ...
... The provinces were free to raise their own money to fund irrigation projects subject to conditions. The expected investments into irrigation projects did not happen due to the Depression (Puttaswamaiah, 1980; Rothermund, 1981 Rothermund, –1982). Instead India emerged as a major regional centre in Britain's war efforts and industrial expansion due to wartime needs created demands for power supply. ...
Inter-state water disputes occur in federal political systems. They stand at the intersection of two branches of law: federalism under constitutional law, and water law – specifically river basin regulation. In India, constitutional federalism is the outcome of colonial history. River-basin regulation is the outcome of developments in capitalism within the social context of Europe and United States, later universalised as international law under the Helsinki Rules and the International Law Commission Convention on Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses. When national law evolved in the historical context of colonisation, intersecting with international law evolved in the historical context of European capitalism, it reproduced imperial-colonial relations of super-ordination and sub-ordination in relation to water. It created an internal schism that locks the water sector into a developmental catharsis.
To what extent was the underdeveloped world caught up in the vortex of the Great Depression? Did the crisis of 1929–33 leave a particular imprint upon the course of the economic history of the Third World during the inter-war period? Can the years spanning this quinquennium be fairly regarded as constituting a distinctive phase within the broader perspective of much longer-run trends? These questions, together with a whole host of related issues concerning the experience of particular areas, communities and industries, have recently been brought into much sharper focus than has hitherto been so. Although this reawakening of concern can be partly put down to the usual workings of the ‘scholarly cycle’, a far more satisfactory explanation may be found in relating it to the current round of public and academic discussion on the impact of the present-day depression. It is surely no coincidence that since the late 1970s there has been a considerable upsurge of interest in the events of that time; indeed it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the subject is forcing its way up the agenda of research priorities at a rate that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. Over the last few years an increasing number of scholars have been busily engaged in the twin task of purposively re-examiningand reassessing a segment of intellectual territory that was once taken very much for granted and virtually shunted off to the sidelines. Thus by the end of 1986 at least three major international conferences will have been convened on the subject, and no less than fifty separate papers will have been presented.
It isan axiom of India's economic history that government financial resources during the last half-century of the British period were inadequate. ‘The poverty of India was matched by the poverty of its government’ writes Dharma Kumar in The Cambridge Economic History and she estimates that ‘except during the two wars of the twentieth century, the tax revenues amounted to a mere 5 to 7 per cent of the national income'. Raymond Goldsmith's assessment is of an even lower proportion realized by taxation and he further believes that the scanty share of government expenditure in national product declined after the first world war. In most of the historiography, this situation is seen as a notable shortcoming created by imperial rule, the inevitable product of the passivity of the ‘night-watchman state’. Reviewing financial policy in 1939, P. J. Thomas described its predominant characteristic as ‘conservatism’, marked by ‘extreme reluctance to venture on new experiments in raising revenue’, ‘the low burden of public debt’ and ‘inadequate expenditure on social services’.3 These features could have played an important role in constricting India's economic and social development, particularly in the inter-war period of the twentieth century. Financial weaknesses then may have undermined the 'new industrial policy' of the post-first world war era4 and in the 1930s superficially present a crucial contrast with Asia's other major industrializing power, Japan, where government appeared to stimulate the economy impressively by massive borrowing and expenditure.5
‘Democratic development’ comprises two ideas: the idea of democracy that calls for devolution of power to communities and the idea of development that calls for conceding power to global institutions public and private. The post-war world has witnessed the simultaneous decentralisation of political power and the centralisation of economic power. Recent movements against large dams draw attention to developmental conflicts that embody this tension but do not theorise the underlying dynamic. Taking the award of the Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal as a point of departure this paper examines the centralisation–decentralisation dynamic in water conflicts in the Krishna basin in Southern India. The paper argues that there is a hiatus in our understanding of legal and institutional relationships in the ‘the economic’ and ‘the political’, ‘the national’ and ‘the international’ and ‘the colonial’ and the ‘post-colonial’ in relation to problems of river basin development. It challenges some conceptual underpinnings of the development paradigm.
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