Indian Politics in Comparative Perspective

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Strategies of Development in India Since Indenpendence

India, in August 1947 emerged as an independent nation to abide by its ‘tryst with destiny’. The two major tasks before the government were:

1. Nation-building.
2. Socio-economic progress.

Esman describes nation-building as ‘the deliberate fashioning of an integrated political community within the fixed geographic boundaries in which the nation state is the dominant political institution’.¹ The related objective of social and economic progress has been defined by Esman as ‘the sustained and widely diffused improvement in material and social welfare’.²

The immensity of the development problems and the urgency of their solution have, in fact, thrust the principal burden of accomplishing development ...