Foreign Aid: The Bokaro Issue

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The Sick Child. Bell made a persuasive case for Bokaro—but the plan remains a difficult pill for Capitol Hill to swallow. Of India's three existing government steel mills, one was built by Great Britain, one by the Soviet Union, and one by West Germany. At all three, construction costs far outran estimates. At the Soviet mill, production costs have been higher than in the private plants. And the West German mill was, until recently, so plagued by mechanical difficulties and labor troubles that it was dubbed "the sick child" of Indian industry. It was with this record in mind that the Clay committee concluded that underdeveloped countries have no right to ask "aid to enterprises which only increase their costs of government and the foreign assistance burden they are asking us to carry."

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