ABSTRACT
India's progress since independence in increasing life expectancy has been truly remarkable; the figure has risen from an average of twenty-seven years upon independence in 1947 to sixty-one years in 1994. Population has more than doubled during that period, with food production, overall, keeping pace— a consequence largely of the so-called green revolution. Contrary to the ethnocentric and tempocentric impression sometimes conveyed by development literature, modernism was not invented by the West, much less by the United States. Nor is there anything particularly new about the essence or the major components of international development. The tendency to blame the victim is by no means peculiar to the field of development. Means of explaining inequality so as to justify it were systematized in religion and philosophy long before such was undertaken by modern social science. Appropriate technology has sometimes been misconceived by advocates of Third World interests as necessarily referring to an older or lower order of technology.
