You may not have seen this written anywhere but you are smart enough to appreciate the fact that Cheddi is responsible for Indian's predicament in Guyana today. Instead of bringing Indians into the modern era, he kept them tied to a plantation (unlike Singapore's late leader) economy,, and they remain economically and politically docile and backward.
How did he keep indians tied to the plantations? What should he have done? What about the indians in the rice industry how they separated from the plantation?
He placed heavy emphasis on agriculture, even though understandably Guyana was an agricultural based society and very underdeveloped. However, not much was done to wean Indians away from farming. The PPP manifesto continued to invest in agriculture, as they should, but issues like diversification and the creation of tertiary and quaternary industries around rice and sugar were ignored. For example, when in the 1970s Brazil experienced the oil market shock they invested heavily in ethanol, now making cars using ethanol. Sugar could be packaged and processed and sold to the west. The same with rice, Guyana could have created different varieties and process and package them to be sold to the industrialized countries also. However, innovative ideas were not applied to both industries. Trinidad had long ago dismantled their Caroni sugar plantation by giving the land to the sugar workers. Clive Thomas did a thorough research on the sugar industry and he had long ago argued for diversification. For Cheddi, the sugar and rice workers were vote banks.