The last of Charan Singh’s major works, Economic Nightmare of India: Its Cause and Cure was published in 1981. This updated Singh’s long-standing critique of the lopsided capital-intensive, industrial and  urban-biased  development path followed by India since Independence in 1947. Singh strings together, in his usual systematic manner, damning data on growing poverty, malnutrition, unemployment, indebtedness and income inequality in India. He warns of a bleak future unless national priorities change to address the vast majority living in rural India.

Singh takes us through a tour of the land system in India, the neglect of agriculture, the exploitation of the peasant and deprivation of the village by priorities of the urban elite. He juxtaposes the opposing patterns of development envisaged by Gandhi and Nehru, and the ills that ‘Socialist’ thinking brought to society including an inefficient public sector. He also goes on to condemn the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few business families, widening income disparities and unemployment.

Singh champions nationwide self-employment, eschewing models based on communism or capitalism as practiced in other nations, as the basis of a self- sufficient and democratic nation. Singh shares solutions that replace the Nehruvian approach with the Gandhian: focus on the village, agriculture, and rural employment. He marshals arguments in favour of primacy to employment over growth in GDP; decentralised industrialization based on labour-intensive techniques of production; strengthening of the small farm peasant economy and avoiding labour displacing mechanisation of agriculture; increasing investments in social and economic infrastructure in rural areas for education, medical facilities, sanitation, civic amenities to dramatically reduce migration to the slums of the cities.