The idea of planning in India, 1930-1951

Abstract

Since the days of Ranade, Naoroji and Dutt and other 'moderate nationalist' economic thinkers, a positive state intervention in economic activities was considered as essential for the development of the Indian economy. It was this notion which was eventually to develop into the idea of planning during the two decades prior to Independence. But however nationalist, this idea, far from being the product of any autonomous Indian thinking on the question, was formed not merely in response to British bureaucratic efforts at planning but acquired much of its content from the latter. The official effort for socio-economic planning in India started in 1930 when George Schuster and some other British administrators took the initiative to Form an Economic Advisory Council. Although that effort was to end in failure, the idea of planning became popular amongst a section of the Indian elites. By the late nineteen-thirties it became central to nationalist economic thought. Bureaucratic effort at planning was revived with the advent of the Second World War. The Indian elites, including the leading capitalists, produced their own plans during the war-period. Both the nationalists and the colonialists found a common ground in the idea of planning as a method of industrialising the economy. Althouqh Gandhians and some 'leftists' produced a number of alternative ideas of planning For socio-economic development, 'industrialism' remained the dominant ideology both among the colonial rulers and the majorjty of the Indian elites. However, the reality of agrarian poverty and discontent forced them to consider the question of the development of agriculture as one of primary importance, and both souqht its solution in a technological improvement of agricultural productivity and not in the restructuring of the social and political relations of landed property. After the Transfer of Power, the new Government formed by the Indian National Congress followed in the footsteps of its colonial predecessor. Faced with the socio-economic crisis created by the Partition and aggravated by low productivity and profiteering in the private sector of the economy, the new Government delayed its programmes for basic reforms. When Jawaharlal Nehru ultimately launched the First Five-Year Plan, it was found to contain little more than what had already been envisaged in the bureaucratic plans formulated during the last few years of British rule. In effect, the Nehruvian project thus amounted to a programme of state-participation in a politico-economic process which increased the economic and political power of the Indian elites. It is the aim of this thesis to make a survey of the idea of planning from its very inception, in the convergence of administrative efforts at regulating the colonial economy and early nationalist efforts to bend that economy in favour of private Indian enterprise, until such time,when that idea matures in independent Indian attempts at formulating plan programmes on the eve of the Transfer of Power and to realise those efforts in the policies of the post-colonial Government of India in the First five-Year Plan. Show more