Dr V. K. R. V. Rao
Vijayendra
Kasturi Ranga Varadaraja Rao
1908-1991
· V. K. R. V. Rao, was a prominent Indian
economist, politician, professor and educator. Arguably, he was one of the best
economists India has produced, and was without doubt the leading creator of its
intellectual institutions.
· Prof. V.K.R.V. Rao falls in the line of great
Indian leaders and scholars such as M.G. Ranade, Gandhiji, J.K. Mehta, who
emphasized the human values and ethics in the discipline of economics.
· For him the nature and purpose of economic
activity is different from what is prescribed in the conventional economics. By
conventional economics we mean the mainstream economics inherited from the
West.
· Rao established three noted institutions in
Social Science research in India:
Ø Delhi
School of Economics,
Ø Institute
of Economic Growth and
Ø The
Institute for Social and Economic Change
· He was also instrumental in establishing the
Ø Indian
Council of Social Science Research,
Ø Agro-economic
Centres and
Ø Population
Research Centres
He
created an autonomous public body in the form of the Indian Council of Social
Science Research.
· Rao completed his Master’s in economics from
Bombay University, where he worked on the taxation of income in India for his
Master’s thesis. He then moved on to Cambridge to pursue his PhD, where he
became a student of Keynes.
· For Rao, economics was a social science that
would aid in improving the human condition. In Cambridge, he discovered that
the tools of government intervention could aid in fulfilling the objective of
economic as well as social betterment.
· Since there was no official body in India to
prepare National Income estimate before Indian Independence, the same was
prepared by some eminent personalities in their personal capacity. Dadabhai Naoroji, fondly called the Grand
Old Man of India, was the pioneer in this field.
· He prepared the first estimates of National
income in 1876. He estimated the national income by first estimating the value
of agricultural production and then adding a certain percentage as
non-agricultural production. However, such method can only been called as a
non-scientific method.
· The first person to adopt a scientific
procedure in estimating the national income was Dr. V K R V Rao in 1931. He
divided the Indian Economy into two parts
Ø Agricultural
Sector which included agriculture, forests, fishing and hunting.
Ø Corporate
Sector which included industries, construction, business, transport and public
services.
· Two different methods were used for
estimating the income in the two sectors.
·
Product method was used for estimating income
in agricultural sector
·
Income method was used for estimating income
in the corporate sector
·
Net Factor Income earned from abroad was
added to the sum of the above two to obtain national income.
· It is difficult to assess the legacy of Dr.
Rao because of his wide-ranging accomplishments in diverse areas — as a scholar
of economics, an institution builder, adviser, politician and Minister. His
early works on the national income of India added valuable insights to the
economic studies of the country. He later went on to write more than 20 books.
FAMOUS QUOTES
· 'Where the value system is in shambles, and
there is no attempt to restore ethical and social norms of conduct, there is no
hope for the future of its people.
· “The link between infrastructure and
development is not a once for all affair. It is a continuous process and
progress in development has to be preceded accompanied and followed by progress
in infrastructure, if we are to fulfill our declared objectives of a
self-accelerating process of economic development”.
· “I believe that therefore our universities should
take positive and purposive action to stimulate in our student world the consciousness
of Indian culture, its traditions and its values, and at the same time an equal
consciousness of the poverty and misery that clogs the lives of so many of our
fellow citizens. Once we get a true understanding of Indian culture and develop
a living consciousness of our social responsibilities, character follows
automatically.”
· "This so called free will of consumer or
what is called the consumer's freedom of choice is itself an assumption that
has been proved to be more of myth than an approximation to reality. Consumer's
choice in the capitalist society of today is based so much on convention, class
standard, cultural complexes and flood of advertisement that his freedom of
choice is more a figure of speech than an actual fact.
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