encouraging him to develop further his ambitious plans for the provision of electricity in rural India ("...I want you to work it out & demonstrate the physical & economic possibility of electrifying every home of the seven hundred thousand villages of India..."), 2 pages, 8vo, Mahabaleshwar, 30 April 1945, weak at fold

A LETTER ON THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF INDIA TO THE SON OF SARAT CHANDRA BOSE. Amiya Nath Bose had been born into one of the leading radical families in the independence movement. He had his university education in England and returned to India in 1944, meeting Gandhi on a number of occasions and working alongside his father. The context of Bose's views on electrification can be found in a review of Agarwal's The Gandhian Plan in The Modern Review of April 1945. Agarwal argued that independent India need not take either a capitalist or socialist road to development, but could take a third "Gandhian" path that would encourage village-based cottage industry. Bose thought that electrification would allow Gandhian Swadeshi to become a means of economic development, and he quoted Gandhi himself as saying that "if we could have electricity in every village home, I shall not mind villagers plying their implements and tools with electricity." Gandhi's words are some way short of a ringing endorsement, however, and he was, in truth, ambivalent about Amiya Bose's plan: when asked in a questionnaire about bringing electricity to India's villages, Gandhi had responded that he was strongly against it (25 March 1945).