There is a number of theories who have explained and interpret the complex process of economic development. As is natural, most of these theories have their drawbacks or inadequacies, in that they do not take into account all the relevant factors in economic development. Moreover, almost all the theories concurrent in the field assume certain distinctive socio-economic and political configurations and circumstances of particular countries as their background. As a result, they are not generalizable, and if they are, then they are relevant at varying levels of generality. Owing to these reasons the conceptual frameworks of a large number of these theories or models are of restricted relevance and applicability. In this paper a study of factors of economic development with special reference to Indian economy has discussed.
KEYWORDS: Economic Development, Socio-Economic, Political Configurations, WDRA, WHR.
Introduction Many of theories of economic development, particularly those advanced by the economists qua economists, do not take into explicit account the non-economic but highly relevant factors co-determining the process of economic development, either owing to the relatively non-quantifiable nature of a good number of such factors or to the difficulties of precisely specifying, identifying and quantifying them, or presumably, in the interest of expositional convenience, or merely on the pretext of simplicity. Whereas the actual position is that historical, religious, ethical, socio-cultural, psychological, demographic, nutritional and environmental, educational, political, administrative and institutional, scientific and technological factors are as relevant as the purely economic ones, for the purpose of building up a nearreal theory of economic development with special reference to India.
The factors determining economic development may be classified as economic and noneconomic, relevant and non-relevant, "more relevant" and "less relevant", exogenous and endogenous, or objective and subjective factors. For the purpose of this work we propose to classify factors in terms of the broad disciplines to which they traditionally belong, under two broad expositional categories, viz. economic and non-economic, knowing full well that such a classification would not, in a multi-disciplinary plane, withstand the rigours of a scientific test. Economic factors are classified as follows:
