DR. AMBEDKAR: AN ECONOMIST PAR EXCELLENCE

Abstract

Dr. Ambedkar was much more than a mere leader of dalits and an architect of Indian Constitution. He was a great economist with insights in almost all the economic aspects of people’s life. What made him a great economist was his humanitarian and well-balanced approach on various economic issues. He believed in socialist philosophy but at the same time recognized the role of private sector. He strongly believed that agricultural productivity depended to a large extent on the progress of industrialization. The range of his work in economics was indeed very extensive. He has contributions in many areas like public finance, monetary economics, labour economics, agricultural economics etc. There are three major works of Ambedkar in Economics. “Administration and Finance of East India Company”, “The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India” and “The Problem of Rupee: Its origin and its solution”. In the first work, he has evaluated finance policy of the East India Company between 1792 to 1858 in India. In his second book, he had evaluated centre-state relations in British India between 1833-1921. His third book relates to monetary and macro economics. The main objective of this paper is to review the contributions of Dr. Ambedkar in the area of economics and evaluate whether his understanding, predictions and suggested economic policies are relevant to the Indian economy in the present scenario or not. The paper is divided into three parts. The first section describes the works of Dr. Ambedkar in the field of economics. The second section illustrates the economic thoughts of Dr. Ambedkar and their relevance for modern Indian economy. The final section sums up the paper with concluding remarks on lessons to be learnt from Dr. Ambedkar’s economic philosophy.