Kautilya on Selection, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Project

Introduction

Kautilya was a learned man. He was an empiricist and did not believe in fate. He was very ethical but not religious. He was very well versed in Vedas and other scriptures. He embraced and promoted the system-building role of Vedic virtues of non-violence, compassion, honesty, truthfulness, tolerance and cleanliness.¹ He definitely had knowledge of Mahabharata since he criticized Yudhisthira for his gambling habit and Duryodhana for his false pride. According to rajadharma as explained in Mahabharata and other scriptures, king was a paid public servant and was expected to protect his public against foreign aggression and provide clean and fair administration. Kautilya wanted to expand a king’s role in the sphere of economic development. He believed that poverty was a living death and a king must take responsibility for raising the standard of living of his people and also protect them against natural disasters.

Kautilya wrote The Arthashastra during —4CE. His objective in writing it was to provide guidelines for building a prosperous, secure, safe, secular and caring nation. He understood the concept of backward induction. His ultimate goal being provision of human security, that is, freedom from wants (prosperity) and freedom from fear (safety and security) he devised a logical chain of the necessary steps to achieve this goal. He argued that human effort and creation of wealth were essential to economic growth. He proceeded to argue that these in turn depended on good institutions and good governance and these in turn depended on an ethical environment. Thus, he argued that system-building was essential to nation-building. According to Kautilya’s predecessors, it was a king’s moral duty to maintain law and order and provide protection against foreign aggression. Kautilya added the economic justification for maintaining law and order. He argued that law and order was essential to economic growth and that, in turn was essential to kingdom’s survival. Kautilya did not refute the role of ethical conduct for attaining eternal bliss as suggested by his predecessors but he emphasized its role in attaining salvation from poverty so that every citizen could enjoy a richer and fuller life.²

Table 1 in Section 1 is used to capture Kautilya’s theoretical construct for providing human security to every citizen.