PROFESSOR Amiya Kumar Bagchi is no more. He passed away on November 28 due to age-related health complications. He was 88 years old.
Professor Bagchi was a towering Marxist economist specialising in economic history and the political economy of India. He was a brilliant student right from his college days. He topped the University of Calcutta in the master of arts examination. He then went on to do a PhD in economics from the University of Cambridge.
His thesis was later published as Private Investment in India, 1900-1939 by the Cambridge University Press as part of the Cambridge South Asian Studies series. The work was a first-of-its-kind sectoral analysis of investment in cotton, jute, iron and steel, cement, sugar and paper industries in India.
Prof. Bagchi showed that the industrial development of India least occupied the attention of the imperial bureaucrats ruling India. Only some sectors were marked by growth which was the result of the British encouragement of foreign trade in keeping up the reputation of the government of India in the London money market.
He also showed that despite the budget surpluses emanating from the stability of the rupee under the gold exchange standard, the British government seldom invested in the development of India or reduced the tax burden on Indians. The tax system continued to be regressive, with land revenues constituting more than a third of the total revenues.
And when the imperial government decided to tweak income taxes, it ended up favouring rich traders, industrialists and lawyers. For all the brouhaha about railway construction by the British in India, Bagchi showed that for a country the size of (undivided) India, only 24,752 miles of railway tracks were open by 1900.
