ABSTRACT
The rise of development economics was an important complement to the consolidation of the idea of national development in the Cold War era. This chapter focuses on the rise and fall of development economics and the relationship between this process and the elaboration of the US-led modernization project via a particular emphasis on the major state-guided national development effort in India up to the 1970s. This focus draws attention to the fact that in the 1950s and early 1960s, before the escalation of US involvement in Vietnam in the mid-and late 1960s and the dramatic emergence of the newly industrializing nation-states of East Asia in the 1970s, the developmental prospects of the Indian sub-continent and the geo-political significance of the new nation-states of India and Pakistan were the subject of considerable international attention (including a great deal of attention from the US). India in particular-because of its sheer size, its appearance as a new nation at the very beginning of the wider post-1945 wave of decolonization, and because of its government’s efforts to maintain a non-aligned stance in the emerging Cold War (particularly under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru 19471964)—occupied a key position in relation to the consolidation and universalization of the idea of development as national development. Within and outside of India there were great expectations that the new government’s efforts to deliver material improvement and prosperity to its citizens could serve as a model of national development throughout the emerging Third World.1
