Small Capitalists or 'Agents of Underdevelopment'? A Case Study of a Large Industrial Estate in South Gujarat

Abstract

In hardly any other country has the small-scale enterprise sector received as much official support as in India. Nevertheless, for a long time small scale industry could not find favour with scholars dealing with the Indian process of industrialisation. For those with a modernisation theoretical frame of reference entrepreneurship was found wanting. Neo-marxists, on the other hand, saw no future for small-scale industry because of the stranglehold of large companies over the economy. The entrepreneurs were seen as commercially oriented and ’rent-seekers’, living off state revenues.With the help of the data relating to a large industrial estate in Gujarat, India, the author re-examines in this paper the validity of some of these views.