INDIA: Billion-Dollar Troubles

Washington was host this week to a vitally important meeting of creditors. Delegates from the U.S., Britain, West Germany, Canada and Japan gathered in a high-ceilinged conference room at World Bank headquarters to decide what they could do about Debtor India. It was a billion-dollar question.

In New Delhi, India's Finance Minister Morarji Desai warned Parliament of the widening gap in foreign exchange, said the government may have to ''mobilize" all the nation's gold—from women's jewelry to hoarded bullion. India needs some $300 million additional credit this year, $500 million next year, more than a billion dollars by 1961. Desai found the situation so desperate that, to avoid defaulting on foreign payments, he was preparing at week's end to make his first journey outside India to plead his nation's case in London, Washington, Montreal. The trip was briefly jeopardized by Desai's ascetic refusal to be inoculated or vaccinated (he opposes on moral grounds the "injection of foreign substances into the body"). Fortunately, the Western countries exempted him from usual health regulations so that he could plead his nation's ill health.

Gouged Earth. Desai leaves behind him an India exhaustedly beginning its twelfth year of independence. For all of its troubles—poverty, illiteracy, disease, violence —much has been accomplished. Considering the handicaps of 14 major languages and some 800 dialects, and the world's second largest supply of people (387 million), India is a model of governmental stability: since 1947, it has had the same Prime Minister, Nehru; the same ruling party, the Congress Party; the same governing philosophy, democratic socialism. Unlike most nations from the Mediterranean to the China Sea, India is not seriously threatened by a revolutionary group or a military clique. Communists rule one state, Kerala, but are having troubles there, and have made surprisingly little headway among the mass of peasants and workers. Across India, steel mills are going up, cities expanding, the red earth being diligently gouged for canals, dams, roads. Among the young, caste distinctions are losing importance, and some Brahman students even do special tutoring among their Untouchable classmates. Universities now graduate more and more engineers and technicians instead of the former stream of lawyers and white-collar unemployables.

But after eleven long years, the zeal to build a brave new India is cooling. The national leadership, from Nehru down to the lowliest babu, seems more tired than inspired. The ruling Congress Party politicos, in their 60s and 70s, seem reluctant to make way for younger men. Corruption, cynicism and maladministration have dulled the nation's spirit. India still produces more babies than it does food to feed them. (Its population increases at the rate of about 5,000,000 a year, nullifying all gains in agricultural productivity.) Money that could help prop the economy goes into the military budget in fear of a possible war with Pakistan over Kashmir.