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Cars & Cow Dung. Compared with the nation's potential, India's economic progress during 18 years of independence is modest enough. Before independence, India had three steel mills; today there are six, producing 4.3 million metric tons of finished steel last year (v. 39.7 million metric tons for Japan). Where there was one oil refinery before 1947, there are now five. At plants in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, India produces three makes of automobiles, all small but expensive (prices range from $2,186 to $2,347; delivery guaranteed within two to eight years). Bicycles are far more popular —and purchasable—hence India's 21 bike plants produce more than a million two-wheelers a year, and every bullock path has its flock of speedsters, carrying everything from milk to millet.
Growth on even so small a scale has begun to alter India's ancient ways of life. The change is best symbolized by the Punjabi capital of Chandigarh, which rises from the sere plains of the northwest in concrete convolutions designed by the famed French architect Le Corbusier. Homemade ghee (clarified butter), which villagers not long ago insisted was the only nourishing cooking medium, is giving way to sealed tins of vegetable oil; kerosene-burning hurricane lanterns are supplanting the traditional Aladdin-like mud diva in peasant huts, and well-to-do farmers often buy a second lantern to hang outside as a sign of affluence. Though most villagers still prefer cooking fires of cow dung, some huts now boast $2 oil stoves. Rural electrification is also spreading, but slowly, with an estimated 80% of India's power requirements still supplied by animal and human effort. The current Five-Year Plan calls for less than 10% of India's villages to be electrified.
Social change has even managed to shiver—if not shatter—India's long-frozen caste system. Low-caste village scavengers—who under Hindu tradition skinned dead livestock to sell the hides —now find less messy jobs. Hide merchants from the cities are forced to send out trucks with their own men to do the dirty work. Higher up the caste ladder, India faces a servant problem even more perplexing than that in the West (TIME, July 9). The punkah wallahs of the past are no longer willing to turn the fans in stifling offices; they have been replaced by air conditioning. Most lower-caste Indians prefer jobs as office boys or chauffeurs.
The face of the land is also changing through vast engineering projects like the 425-mile Rajasthan Canal and the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam, both being built largely by hand labor. By contrast, Bombay boasts a modern, $55 million atomic power plant. Indian nuclear physicists could easily build an atomic bomb in a year to 18 months, but India has no real military use for it. Still, India may well be forced to develop nuclear weapons if only to recapture international prestige, particularly since Red China has begun exploding atomic devices.