Manufacturing Problems in India

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 331 be of great value to the increasingly numerous band of collectors of early devices. Perhaps the best tribute I can pay is that I have bought an extra copy to send to one of my friends. W. T. O’Dea* Manufacturing Problems in India: The Cummins Diesel Experience. By Jack Baranson. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1967. Pp. xix+146. $5.95. This is a needed book. Those who have sought to study systematically the interrelationships of science, technology, and public policy in less developed countries are acutely conscious of the dearth of solid, careful case studies on which meaningful and valid generalizations can be made. We need many more Jack Baransons and many more studies of the Cummins Engine Company or its equivalent in less developed countries. Whether India, the Cummins Engine Company, or the modern world needs more experiences like that of Cummins in India is, however, another matter. The book is a case study of problems of technological transfer in the diesel engine manufacturing field. The study involves an American corporation with considerable international experience and a less de­ veloped country which, however, is by no means typical of countries usually labeled in that way. Baranson describes in some detail the style of operation of the Cummins Engine Company in the United States and elsewhere in the world where it has manufacturing operations under­ way and recounts the experiences (from the point of view of the American management, often frustrating) in initiating a relatively com­ plex technological undertaking in India. He then proceeds, on the basis of detailed production cost comparisons and analysis of produc­ tion and managerial difficulties, to draw lessons from the Cummins experience in India in terms of their implications for public policy in a world increasingly polarized by disparities in material well-being. The importance of Baranson’s study lies in the challenge which it presents to existing policies of industrialization, technological develop­ ment, and trade relations followed by less and more developed nations. As Professor Harry Johnson, himself a leading student of these issues, emphasizes in his Introduction to the book: Basically, Dr. Baranson shows by concrete example that the policy of develop­ ment by industrialization directed at the national market and implemented by import-substitution policies, which has thus far dominated both development theory and planning practice, has been based on a mythology of industry quite unrelated to the reality of modern industrial organization. That mythology, especially in its elaboration of traditional “infant industry” argu­ * Mr. O’Dea is director-general of the Ontario Centennial Centre of Science and Technology. He is the author of publications on engineering and probability and of The Social History of Lighting. 332 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ment into an “infant economy” argument for production, has stressed the concept of “learning by doing”—a concept which naturally appeals to the nationalistic psychology of the people in the less-developed countries. It has assumed that the mere fact of political existence entitles a nation to try to learn how to do everything for itself, and enables it to do so. What this assumption overlooks, ignores, or denies is that modern industry has a logic of its own . . . and that the attempt to violate the logic by forcing industrial development indiscriminately in a hostile environment can be extremely waste­ ful and inefficient . . . [p. viii]. If Baranson’s comparative cost figures are correct and if the Cummins experience in India is at all representative, forced industrial develop­ ment in a “hostile” environment is indeed wasteful and inefficient. Baranson estimates that costs in India run anywhere from 3.5 to 4.1 times the U.S. costs for manufacturing a particular series of diesel engines originally developed by Cummins for the American market. Among the many factors which contributed to this melancholy sta­ tistic are the difficulties in acquiring component parts in India which are readily available in the United States and the high cost of developing suppliers of these parts (or of having them made by Kirloskar-Cummins, the joint corporate enterprise established in India to manufacture the Cummins diesel engines); Government of India policies regarding allo­ cation of foreign exchange

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