MODERNISATION AND DEVELOPMENT BY S.C DUBE

       
Shyama Charan Dube belongs to that category of social anthropologist who did not do their
master’s or Ph.D. Social change and economic development has been the major theme of his
several works like India’s Changing Villages: Human Factors in Community Development
(1958).
Development is something to which we all aspire, and the ideas about the best means of
achieving our own aspirations and needs are potentially as old as human civilisation.
Modernization is an all-encompassing and global process of cultural and socio-economic
changes whereby developing countries seek to acquire some of the characteristics common to
industrially advanced countries.
Dube considers the actual structural implications of change as well as the nature of some of the
processes of change. In his book on Contemporary India and Its Modernization (1974), Dube
deals with subjects as diverse as bureaucracy, leadership, education, planning, and secularism.
Dube identifies several components for constructing an adequate national framework for
modernization. They are:
1. The cohesive bonds of society must be strengthened. In this context, the close
connection between legitimacy and credi-bility must be emphasized.
2. Social restraint and social discipline are important.
3. Everyone, from the highest to lowest, should be subjected equally to the norms of
restraint and discipline.
4. The reward system should be structured that it encourages excellence of performance
and curbs inefficiency and corruption.
Dube, in his book Modernization and Development (1988), has divided the growth and
diversification or specification of the concept of development into four phases. In the first
phase, development essentially meant economic development.
In the second phase, economic development and techno-logical change was hindered by
institutional factors.
The third phase may be described a reactive and responsive one. It was born out of a strong
reaction in the inadequate paradigm of development and modernization.
The fourth phase is a reflexive phase. One has to understand the world order and also the
national orders. Both have to be altered if human social survival is too ensured.
The theme of development and modernization has been uppermost in the work of Dube for
the last two decades. It began prominently with the publication of his collection of articles titled
Contemporary India and its Modernization (1973) and Explanation and Management of
Change (1971) and Culminated in Modernization and Development(1988). S. C. Dube has
always advocated for a dynamic social science responsive to the contemporary challenges. His
Social Science in Changing Society is an important contribution in this field.