Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Industrial Revolution in India

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
A Technological History of Cold-War India, 1947–⁠1969

Abstract

This chapter explains the technological and economic background of Nehruvian development. The narrative begins with the colonial period, which saw extensive infrastructural development and limited introduction of mechanized industry. After independence Nehru’s Congress government launched a series of five-year plans, which were intended to develop India’s economy and industrial base and set the nation on the road to autarky and self-reliance. The chapter describes the first three five-year plans (which all together ran from 1951 to 1966) and explores in detail two aspects of Nehruvian development: import substitution and the need to use secondhand machinery or keep machines running far longer than their designers had originally intended. The Indian heavy electrical equipment industry serves as a case study for import substitution in the public sector.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Frank Moraes, ed., The Indian and Pakistan Year Book and Who’s Who 1951 (Bombay: Times of India, 1951), 14.

  2. 2.

    Indian and Pakistan Year Book, 14, 18, 275–76. The official population figures from the 1951 census omitted the tribal people of Assam and the inhabitants of the contested territory of Jammu-Kashmir. For Gandhi’s views on the primacy of villages to India, see Divya Joshi, ed., Gandhiji on Villages (Mumbai: Gandhi Book Centre, 2002), https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/Gandhionvillages.pdf.

  3. 3.

    Indian and Pakistan Year Book 1951, 14.

  4. 4.

    Indian and Pakistan Year Book 1951, 17.

  5. 5.

    Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 67–9; Dharma Kumar, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 2:19, 24; Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 198–99.

  6. 6.

    Cambridge Economic History of India, 2:19.

  7. 7.

    Cambridge Economic History of India, 2:574.

  8. 8.

    Cambridge Economic History of India, 2:588–89; Gijsbert Oonk, “The Emergence of Indigenous Industrialists in Calcutta, Bombay, and Ahmedabad, 1850–1947,” Business History Review 88 (Spring 2014): 57–63.

  9. 9.

    Oonk, “Emergence of Indigenous Industrialists,” 48–57.

  10. 10.

    Embassy of India, One Year of Independence (Washington, DC: Embassy of India, 1948), 31; Indian and Pakistan Year Book 1951, 263; Annual Report of the Tennessee Valley Authority 1948 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1948), 84.

  11. 11.

    Bipan Chandra, et al., India’s Struggle for Independence, 1857–1947 (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1988), 71–3.

  12. 12.

    Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: Harper & Row, 1950), 10, 13, 25–7, 40.

  13. 13.

    Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, 194–95.

  14. 14.

    The quotes are from “Machinery,” in M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule (1908; repr. Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan, 1938), 80–4. Gyan Prakash discusses the Nehru-Gandhi debate at length in Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 201–25.

  15. 15.

    Ross Bassett, The Technological Indian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 14, 90.

  16. 16.

    Frank Moraes, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (New York: MacMillan, 1956), 15–6, 22, 28.

  17. 17.

    Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (1936; repr. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2004), 390–91; Moraes, Jawaharlal Nehru, 213–14.

  18. 18.

    Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New York: John Day, 1946), 411, 414, 525.

  19. 19.

    Nehru, Discovery of India, 359, 411.

  20. 20.

    Chandra, et al., India’s Struggle for Independence, 124–34.

  21. 21.

    For the Green Revolution, see Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

  22. 22.

    B.N. Sinha, Industrial Geography of India (Calcutta: World Press, 1972), 14; David Arnold, Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

  23. 23.

    Nehru, Discovery of India, 399–402.

  24. 24.

    Nehru, Discovery of India, 402; Sunila S. Kale, Electrifying India: Regional Political Economies of Development (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 32.

  25. 25.

    Judith M. Brown, Nehru: A Political Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 205, 240; Cambridge Economic History of India, 2:950.

  26. 26.

    Planning Commission, First Five Year Plan, http://planningcommission.nic.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/1st/welcome.html (accessed January 13, 2014); Planning Commission, Second Five Year Plan, http://planningcommission.nic.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/2nd/welcome.html (accessed January 13, 2014); Cambridge Economic History of India, 2:954.

  27. 27.

    Planning Commission, Second Five Year Plan, http://planningcommission.nic.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/2nd/welcome.html (accessed January 13, 2014); Cambridge Economic History of India, 2:954; David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 120; Paul Bareau, Roland Bird, and Andrew Shonfield, “India’s Second Five-Year Plan,” International Affairs 33, no. 3 (July 1957): 301–9.

  28. 28.

    Planning Commission, Third Five Year Plan, http://planningcommission.nic.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/3rd/welcome.html (accessed January 13, 2014); Cambridge Economic History of India, 2:954–55.

  29. 29.

    Morris Bian argues convincingly in The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) that Chinese planning under Mao was based on theories formulated by Sun Yat-sen in the early twentieth century; the plans were not mere copies of Stalin’s program.

  30. 30.

    David Christian, Imperial and Soviet Russia: Power, Privilege and the Challenge of Modernity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 277, 286.

  31. 31.

    For critiques of Soviet industrialization, see Loren R. Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Boris Komarov, The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union (White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1980).

  32. 32.

    David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 118.

  33. 33.

    Edgerton, Shock of the Old, 118; Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 100–3. Autarky was also popular in communist countries that were isolated from the outside world and from each other, such as North Korea and Albania.

  34. 34.

    One of the indigenous Indonesian locomotives, Bima Kunting 3, is on permanent display in a park in front of Benteng Vredeburg, a historic Dutch fort in the central Javan city of Yogyakarta.

  35. 35.

    Edgerton, Shock of the Old, 118. Literary critic Edward Said’s father ran an office-supply business in Cairo during Nasser’s Arab socialism. His domestically assembled office furniture was made of imported steel. Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (London: Granta, 2014), 288.

  36. 36.

    David S. Painter, “Oil and the American Century,” Journal of American History 99, no. 1 (June 2012): 26, 30–31; Matías F. Travieso-Díaz, “Resolving U.S. Expropriation Claims against Cuba,” in Paths for Cuba: Reforming Communism in Comparative Perspective, ed. Scott Morgenstern, Jorge Pérez-López (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 118.

  37. 37.

    R.C. Bhargava and Seetha, The Maruti Story: How a Public Sector Company Put India on Wheels (Noida: Collins Business, 2010), 4–5; The Complete Encyclopedia of Motorcars: 1885 to the Present (2 nd ed., New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973), 358.

  38. 38.

    V. Krishnamurthy, “Management of organizational change: The BHEL experience,” Vikalpa 2, no. 2 (April 1977): 113–19; D.C. Baijal, “March towards self-sufficiency: Power development in India,” Indian and Foreign Review, February 15, 1966, 10–11.

  39. 39.

    M.V. Pylee, “Government enterprises in the Indian economy,” Asian Survey 1, no. 7 (September 1961): 16–26; Cambridge Economic History of India, 2:963.

  40. 40.

    “Heavy Electrical Project,” India News, November 8, 1963.

  41. 41.

    Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd., First Annual Report 1964–65 (New Delhi: Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd., 1965); Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd., Second Annual Report 1965–66 (New Delhi: Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd., 1966).

  42. 42.

    S. Swayambu, “A Decade of Progress in Power Equipment Manufacture,” Indian Journal of Power and River Valley Development (IJPRVD) 21, no. 4 (April 1971): 113–14, 147; S. Sarangapani, “Heavy Electrical Project,” Assam Tribune Magazine, November 6, 1960; BHEL, First Annual Report 1964–65; “Starting Production of Heavy Power Equipment in India,” Czechoslovak Heavy Industry, May 1966, 20; BHEL, Second Annual Report 1965–66; “Bharat Heavy Electricals’ maiden profit,” IJPRVD 21, no. 9 (September 1971): 354–55; “BHEL boiler know-how pact with US firm,” IJPRVD 21, no. 3 (March 1971): 109; A. Chakravarti, “The Social Profitability of Training Unskilled Workers in the Public Sector in India,” Oxford Economic Papers 24, no. 1 (March 1972): 114–15.

  43. 43.

    BHEL, First Annual Report 1964–65.

  44. 44.

    Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd., Sixth Annual Report 1969–70 (New Delhi: Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd., 1970); “BHEL’s Wonderland Accounting,” Economic and Political Weekly, May 16, 1970, 792–93.

  45. 45.

    Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd., Fourth Annual Report 1967–68 (New Delhi: Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd., 1968); Y.K. Murthy, “The Giri Hydro-Electric Project,” IJPVRD 18, no. 7 (July 1968): 259–64; “HEL’s Power Projects,” Hindustan Times, December 27, 1965; Swayambu, “A Decade of Progress in Power Equipment Manufacture,” 146; “Bharat Heavy Electricals’ Maiden Profit,” IJPRVD 21, no. 9 (September 1971): 354–55; “About Us,” Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd., http://www.bhel.com/about.php (accessed October 7, 2014).

  46. 46.

    BHEL, Fourth Annual Report 1967–68; “Bharat Heavy Electricals’ Maiden Profit,” 354–55.

  47. 47.

    Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd., Fifth Annual Report 1968–69 (New Delhi: Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd., 1969); Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd., Sixth Annual Report and Accounts 1969–70 (New Delhi: Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd., 1970); “About Us,” Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd., http://www.bhel.com/about.php (accessed October 7, 2014).

  48. 48.

    Cambridge Economic History of India, 2:955.

  49. 49.

    Cambridge Economic History of India, 2:589.

  50. 50.

    Cambridge Economic History of India, 2:561.

  51. 51.

    J.S.R. Mohan Rao, “Nagarjuna Sagar Dam,” in Design and Construction Features of Selected Dams in India (New Delhi: Central Board of Irrigation and Power, 1979), 77–115; Masonry Dams in India (New Delhi: Central Water and Power Commission, 1972), 17–20.

  52. 52.

    J.H. Walker, “Aluminum Windings for Hydroelectric Generators: A Critical Analysis,” Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers 114 (October 1967): 1464–70; Sinha, Industrial Geography of India, 218–24.

  53. 53.

    Roger Chesneau, Aircraft Carriers of the World, 1914 to the Present: An Illustrated Encyclopedia (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1984), 134–51; Norma Friedman, British Carrier Aviation: The Evolution of the Ships and their Aircraft (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1988), 242; David Hobbs, Aircraft Carriers of the Royal and Commonwealth Navies: The Complete Illustrated Encyclopedia from World War I to the Present (London: Greenhill Books, 1996), 107, 200–1. INS Vikrant served as a museum ship from 2001 to 2012, after which it was scrapped. The Bajaj company subsequently produced commemorative motorcycles made from the aircraft carrier’s scrap.

References

  1. Arnold, David. Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  2. Baijal, D.C. “March towards Self-sufficiency: Power Development in India.” Indian and Foreign Review, February 15, 1966, 10–11.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Bareau, Paul, Roland Bird, and Andrew Shonfield. “India’s Second Five-Year Plan.” International Affairs 33, no. 3 (1957): 301–9.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Bassett, Ross. The Technological Indian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  5. Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd. Fifth Annual Report 1968–69. New Delhi: Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd., 1969.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd. First Annual Report 1964–65. New Delhi: Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd., 1965.

    Google Scholar 

  7. Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd. Fourth Annual Report 1967–68. New Delhi: Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd., 1968.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd. Second Annual Report 1965–66. New Delhi: Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd., 1966.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd. Sixth Annual Report and Accounts 1969–70. New Delhi: Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd., 1970.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd. Third Annual Report 1966–67. New Delhi: Bharat Heavy Electricals, Ltd., 1967.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Bhargava, R.C., and Seetha. The Maruti Story: How a Public Sector Company Put India on Wheels. Noida: Collins Business, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Brown, Judith M. Nehru: A Political Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Chakravarti, A. “The Social Profitability of Training Unskilled Workers in the Public Sector in India.” Oxford Economic Papers 24 (1972): 114–15.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Chandra, Bipan, Mridula Mukherjee, and Aditya Mukherjee. India Since Independence. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Christian, David. Imperial and Soviet Russia: Power, Privilege and the Challenge of Modernity. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986.

    Google Scholar 

  16. Cullather, Nick. The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Design and Construction Features of Selected Dams in India. New Delhi: Central Board of Irrigation and Power, 1979.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Edgerton, David. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Engerman, David C. The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  20. Fischer, Louis. The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. New York: Harper & Row, 1950.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Frank, Andre Gunder. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  22. Gandhi, M.K. Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule. 1908; repr. Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan, 1938.

    Google Scholar 

  23. Kale, Sunila S. Electrifying India: Regional Political Economies of Development. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Moraes, Frank, ed. The Indian and Pakistan Year Book and Who’s Who 1951. Bombay: Times of India, 1951.

    Google Scholar 

  25. Moraes, Frank. Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography. New York: MacMillan, 1956.

    Google Scholar 

  26. Murthy, Y.K. “The Giri Hydro-Electric Project.” IJPVRD 18 (1968): 259–64.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India. New York: John Day, 1946.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Oonk, Gijsbert. “The Emergence of Indigenous Industrialists in Calcutta, Bombay, and Ahmedabad, 1850–1947.” Business History Review 88 (Spring 2014): 43–71.

    Google Scholar 

  29. Pacey, Arnold. Technology in World Civilization. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  30. Painter, David S. “Oil and the American Century.” Journal of American History 99, no. 1 (2012): 24–39.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Planning Commission. First Five Year Plan. http://planningcommission.nic.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/1st/welcome.html (accessed January 13, 2014).

    Google Scholar 

  32. Planning Commission. Second Five Year Plan. http://planningcommission.nic.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/2nd/welcome.html (accessed January 13, 2014).

    Google Scholar 

  33. Planning Commission. Third Five Year Plan. http://planningcommission.nic.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/3rd/welcome.html (accessed January 13, 2014).

    Google Scholar 

  34. Prakash, Gyan. Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  35. Pylee, M.V. “Government Enterprises in the Indian Economy.” Asian Survey 1, no. 7 (1961): 16–26.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Raychaudhuri, Tapan, Irfan Habib, Dharma Kumar, and Meghnad Desai. The Cambridge Economic History of India. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982–83.

    Google Scholar 

  37. Sinha, B.N. Industrial Geography of India. Calcutta: World Press, 1972.

    Google Scholar 

  38. “Starting Production of Heavy Power Equipment in India.” Czechoslovak Heavy Industry, May 1966, 20.

    Google Scholar 

  39. Swayambu, S. “A Decade of Progress in Power Equipment Manufacture.” IJPRVD 21 (April 1971): 113–14, 147.

    Google Scholar 

  40. Walker, J.H. “Aluminum Windings for Hydroelectric Generators: A Critical Analysis.” Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers 114 (1967): 1464–70.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History, Pacific Union College, Angwin, CA, USA

    William A.T. Logan

Authors
  1. William A.T. Logan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Logan, W.A. (2022). The Industrial Revolution in India. In: A Technological History of Cold-War India, 1947–⁠1969. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78767-7_2

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78767-7_2

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-78766-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-78767-7

  • eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation