Mahavira Jain Vidyalaya Rajat Jayanti Mahotsava

Author(s): Mahavir Jain Vidyalaya Mumbai
Publisher: Mahavir Jain Vidyalay

Page 199

40
K. U. BARODIA
[M. J. VIDYALAYA
no fault of their own, is it not a waste of energy? Is it not economic waste? Is it not social injustice?. --and be it known that educated and middle class people when unemployed are the best inflammable material which can be ignited with a match-stick of communist or socialist doctrine. Our Government, it must be remembered, is non-Indian, if it cannot be said that it is anti-Indian. It is a foreign government which has not established its rule in this country for the purposes of charity. As it must be the case, the Government of India is tied to the apron strings of the Whitehall and remains utterly indifferent, if not negligent, towards Indian Economic problems. To quote Mr. Ramsey Macdonald, again, Government in India is extravagant and that the Britishers have behaved meanly towards India' remains a fact even to-day. In short, our Government is irresponsible to our needs, irresponsible to national demands and is irremovable by an elective vote. Rural indebtedness has mounted up to at least Rs. 3000/ crores and the much criticised policy of taxation of 'tax the poor and let off the rich' has made the burden of taxation absolutely unbearable. To-day literacy, which has much to do with the economic well-being of the people, apart from its cultural and intellectual aspects, is barely 8%, while the female education stands at somewhere at about 2.5%. This stands out of relief as one of the great achievement of the British rule in India. It will be interesting here to note that Germany, Russia and Japan to-day have achieved 99% literacy and, out of these, Japan within quarter of a century. This proves beyond all doubt what a national government can achieve. All these lead to one inevitable conclusion that there is something fundamentally wrong with our economic life and that the conditions of our economic life to-day are not only most rotten but are abominably ghastly. It is not the purpose of this article to apportion the blame of this but it is a fact that these conditions do not reflect any credit on us and the State and the people are both to be blamed for the same.
This brings us to planning--planning which will remove these defects or wrongs from our body economic. These symptoms of the malady are such that they might eat up the whole super structure of human society in India any day. Planning assumes a planning authority to execute the same. This necessarily means the transfer of power from Britain to India. To-day, we are not recognised as a nation and thus planning has assumed mere academic importance. But we presume that India will be a nation one day and that it will have to put its house in order, economically and politically. No more is India at cross roads of dependancy and independence. The rubicon is already crossed and we are promised a dominion status at an early date.