Full Employment Through Charkha

Full Employment Through Charkha

This innovative economic program besides developing and brightening rural India also gurantees full employment to every unemployed man or woman in the country.
The total number of districts in India is about 640,each having a District Panchayat, under which there are on an average 10 Block Panchayats,each again having on an average 40 Village Panchayats,totaling 2,56,000 Village Panchayats in all, as conceived by our late Prime Minister,Sri Rajeev Gandhi.
The idea is to establish in each village Panchayat SSI units with latest models of multi-spindle spinning wheels, pit loom, dyeing units, standby diesel generating sets,godowns for raw materials and finished goods, besides facilities for other village tiny and small industries,bee-keeping,dairy etc to provide multiple employment choices to every unemployed man and woman resident there.
No constitutional or legislative processes would be involved in its implementation. It is only a strategy to be approved and adopted by the government and can be activated with immediate effect since all peripheral institutions and related departments like KVIC and Khadi Gramodyogs and State/District/Block/Village level Panchayat raj set-ups already exist, probably waiting for this core project to emerge guaranteeing full employment to our country men.
No finances would be required for setting up this vast, widely dispersed and highly labour intensive national net work of village panchayat based Khadi manufacturing units, which henceforth I would love to call National Textile Industry (N T I)…..courtesy Gandhism.
No fear at all regarding full economic viability of the N T I…. (National Textile Industry)…….courtesy Keynesism.
Our new measure of economic progress would be… Human happiness and wellbeing…. Courtesy Sarkosyism 10%.
Problems regarding financing and economic viability mentioned above have easy solutions as explained below:
a) Each village Panchayat mfg unit can easily avail Term Loan, Working capital loan and Cash Credit facilities from scheduled Banks duly guaranteed by the government as per normal banking practices.
b) As for assured economic viability we have to rely on the universally accepted Keynesian doctrine” General theory of employment, interest and money” which says that “…. deliberate government action can foster full employment by directly influencing demand for goods and services by altering tax policies and public expenditure…”
Without doubt N T I would be capable of producing only major %age of rough and medium quality and minor %age of fine quality textile. So what? The State would intervene, alter Excise duty, Sales tax, subsidise, ban production of similar range by large units and issue orders for compulsory use of N T I products in form of curtains, bed covers uniforms of peons and constables, by all government offices and departments, PSUs, Rlys and Defense as far as practicable. These special measures would offer no problems at all for the government in view of the sanctity of the purpose behind them.

Of-course, the nation will have to be mentally conditioned to accept instead of the current single bottom line of money in the national balance sheet, a triple bottom line i.e. 1.Money profit. 2. Social happiness and wellbeing. 3.Environmental good which may result in a little lower GDP growth eschewing the international mad rush for ill-gotten higher growth rates based on the detestable Carbon economy and the critical depletion of natural resources, as so emphatically stressed by President Sarkosy of France, one of the five Super powers in the world. Our own late J R D Tata expressed a similar view as follows after receiving our nation’s highest honor ‘Bharat Ratna’ in 1992:“I do not want India to be an economic super power. I want India to be a happy country”.

Smt Sonia Gandhi’s unique MNAREGA with an annual budgetary provision of Rs 40,400 crores is in full operation and provides one person of each rural family 100 days of employment in a year at Rs 100/-per day. This is certainly a big relief to the vast number of our unemployed countrymen but it still falls short of the ultimate target of full employment. It is hoped that the Congress party and the government would approve this project, which does not need any budgetary provision, and implement it so that in due course it may replace MANAREGA and save the enormous present annual outlay on it,

This new strategic program is based on the ideal curve in the graph of the two major variables, sustainable economic prosperity and human happiness and once the government implements it, the ethereal music of millions of spinning wheels and the accompanying billions of beats of the shuttles of matching number of weaving looms would reverberate through the 2,56,000 N T I units—“modern temples” in the historic words of our beloved late Prime Minister Pt.Nehru—across our land, providing every single citizen, man or woman, with work and his daily bread.

Atul Kumar Jain,
The 29th Nov 2011 New Area,
Dalmianagar-821305
(Dist.Rohtas,Bihar)