Project Man­ag­er: Karl Müller-Bahlke
Project Sta­tus: running

The expe­ri­ence of Indi­an devel­op­ment plan­ning after 1947 has attract­ed the atten­tion of inter­na­tion­al econ­o­mists and his­to­ri­ans for a long time. The study of its pos­si­bil­i­ties and lim­i­ta­tions has been the launch­ing point for dis­cus­sions about every­thing from the per­sis­tence of glob­al inequal­i­ty to the ori­gins of neolib­er­al­ism. As the largest non-com­mu­nist project of its kind, ques­tions about the respon­si­bil­i­ty of state insti­tu­tions and pri­vate busi­ness have been cen­tral to these dis­cus­sions. At the heart of “Nehru­vian” devel­op­men­tal­ism (named after the first Prime Min­is­ter of India, Jawa­har­lal Nehru) were the pub­lic sec­tor steel plants, meant to sup­ply the Indi­an econ­o­my with the mate­r­i­al basis for rapid industrialization.

At these sites, the Indi­an plan­ners were faced with a strate­gic con­tra­dic­tion: on the one hand, domes­tic steel pro­duc­tion was cen­tral for the cho­sen mod­el of ‘Import Sub­sti­tut­ing Indus­tri­al­iza­tion’ that was to reduce eco­nom­ic depen­dence on for­eign pow­ers. On the oth­er hand, the giant inte­grat­ed plants could only be built with for­eign tech­ni­cal aid. The solu­tion was geopo­lit­i­cal diver­si­fi­ca­tion: Great Britain, the Sovi­et Union and West-Ger­many were all to pro­vide help for one of the first gen­er­a­tion of plants respec­tive­ly. The West-Ger­man plant in Rourkela was built with the help of a con­sor­tium of steel and engi­neer­ing firms, most notably Krupp and Demag.

The archival sources of these firms pro­vide a unique look into how the state-busi­ness nexus of the Indi­an devel­op­ment effort, the top­ic of such heat­ed con­tro­ver­sy on the macro-lev­el, played out in one of its most cen­tral are­nas: the shopfloor of the inte­grat­ed steel plant. The project seeks to explore these sources to deter­mine how the man­i­fold require­ments of such plants shaped the pol­i­cy debates of the dif­fer­ent actors with stakes in their oper­a­tion: from the local, region­al and nation­al state struc­tures in India to Indi­an, Ger­man and British pri­vate busi­ness. In a com­par­a­tive effort with the British sources the ori­gins of these plants are traced back into the tur­bu­lent sec­ond half of the 40s, a time in which the rela­tion­ship between states and their steel indus­tries was much less decid­ed, not only in India, but in Britain and Ger­many as well.