Economic Thought of Gandhi

"I WOULD LIKE TO SAY TO THE DILIGENT READER OF MY WRITINGS AND to others who are interested in them that I am not at all concerned with appearing to be consistent. In my search after Truth I have discarded many ideas and learnt many new things. Old as I am in age, I have no feeling that I have ceased to grow inwardly or that my growth will stop at the dissolution of the flesh. What I am concerned with is my readiness to obey the call of Truth, my God, from moment to moment, and, therefore, when anybody finds any inconsistency between any two writings of mine, if he has still faith in my sanity, he would do well to choose the latter of the two on the same subject." 1 Gandhiji was not a scholar in the sense in which Karl Marx was. He did not try to present a pre-worked-out, complete and self-contained theory of his economic ideas. In that sense he was not the father of a 'systematic body of thought.' He himself did not very much like the term 'Gandhism.' He was seeking his own solutions to the concrete problems as he found them in the Indian situation,2 and though many may not accept the solutions which he proposed, he must receive credit for being the first to identify some of the basic issues facing the Indian economy with its background of colonial exploitation, underdevelopment, large-scale unemployment and underemployment. He was not content with laying the burden of the blame at the door of the foreign rule. He was seeking to provide an alternative which would give the masses a chance to achieve a higher standard of living, consistent with the maintenance of individual freedom and human dignity. Since his approach was basically self -consistent, his solutions, worked out, elaborated and modified from time to time, automatically tended to fall within the pattern of a systematic body of thought. Gandhiji's approach to most of the economic problems was essentially practical. Unfortunately, this is not commonly recognized. The limitations of his solutions were generally due to the limitations of the situation. The only important issue on which his approach was rather rigid and impracticable was in relation to the need for control of population. According to Gandhiji, if every man was prepared to work and if men did not hanker