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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
In 1958, on his first visit to India, the Hungarian-British development economist Peter Bauer was eager to meet the Indian economist B. R. Shenoy. Bauer knew the name from a “Note of Dissent on the Memorandum of the Economists’ Panel,” which Shenoy had written criticizing India’s Second Five-Year Plan. In 1955 the Indian government had recruited twenty-one senior Indian economists for the Panel of Economists, chaired by the minister of finance, to review the plan. Twenty of the economists had signed a memorandum endorsing the plan. Professor Shenoy was the lone dissenter. Shenoy’s “Note of Dissent” was an annoyance to members of the Indian Planning Commission; to Prime Minister Nehru, who had initiated the planning effort; to Nehru’s adviser P. C. Mahalanobis, who had drafted the plan; and even to international aid officials, who overwhelmingly supported the planning effort. Shenoy had become persona non grata in official economic policy-making circles. Bauer soon discovered this firsthand, as he later described:
I called on a senior officer of the economic section of the British High Commission [in New Delhi]. I asked him whether he or his colleagues were in any sort of contact with Shenoy. He said that people there were too busy to have time for acknowledged madmen…. I may add that at about the same time I visited the Delhi School of Economics and the National Council of Applied Economic Research. There also I found considerable and often not well founded disagreement with Shenoy’s views, but nothing like the disdain exhibited by this arrogant and ignorant mandarin at the High Commission.
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