The focus of the Second Five Year Plan was:

Correct — B, rapid industrialization with emphasis on the development of basic and heavy industries. The Second Plan, running from 1956 to 1961, was built on the model P. C. Mahalanobis worked out at the Indian Statistical Institute. Its argument was that a poor country grows fastest by first building the industries that make machines, because those industries then produce the capacity to make everything else; consumer goods and farm output would follow from the machinery those plants supplied. Policy followed the model closely. The Industrial Policy Resolution of 30 April 1956, placed before Parliament by the Prime Minister and reprinted as an annexure to the Plan itself, reserved seventeen industries in Schedule A for the State — arms, atomic energy, iron and steel, heavy plant and machinery, heavy electricals, coal, mineral oils, aircraft, railways, shipbuilding, electricity generation among them — and listed twelve more in Schedule B for progressive state ownership. The three integrated steel plants of the period, Bhilai with Soviet help, Rourkela with West German and Durgapur with British, are that resolution made visible. So the Plan's own focus statement is the one the paper prints in option (b).

• (a)establishment of a self-reliant and self-generating economy with emphasis on agriculture. — The words describe the Third Plan, which set out to make the economy self-reliant and self-generating and brought agriculture back to the front after the shortages of the late fifties. The Second Plan moved resources in the opposite direction — it cut agriculture's share of outlay to make room for industry.
• (c)removal of poverty and attainment of self-reliance. — That is the Fifth Plan, the Garibi Hatao plan of the mid-seventies, whose twin objectives were exactly removal of poverty and self-reliance. It comes almost twenty years after the Plan the question asks about.
• (d)acceleration of food-grain production and increase in employment opportunities and overall productivity. — Food-grain output and employment became planning priorities from the Fourth Plan onwards, after the food crisis of the mid-sixties and the arrival of Green Revolution technology. The Second Plan's designers accepted slower growth in consumer goods and in farm output as the price of building capital-goods capacity.

The First Plan applied the Harrod-Domar framework and put its money into irrigation, power and agriculture, with Bhakra, Hirakud and the Damodar Valley projects begun in those years. The Second Plan changed the strategy rather than the pace, adopting Mahalanobis's four-sector model with its priority for the capital-goods sector, and it is the Plan that fixed the shape of Indian industrial policy for three decades. The Third Plan aimed at a self-reliant and self-generating economy but was wrecked by the wars of 1962 and 1965 and the drought of 1965-66, which brought on a plan holiday and, in 1966, devaluation.

Questions of this kind are answered by matching a slogan to a number, and the safest way in is to hold two anchors and reason outward. The Second Plan is heavy industry and Mahalanobis; the Fifth is Garibi Hatao and self-reliance. Anything about food grains and employment belongs after the mid-sixties, and anything about inclusive or sustainable growth belongs to the Eleventh and Twelfth. It is worth knowing the cost side of the Second Plan as well as its ambition. The import bill for plant and machinery ran ahead of what exports could pay for, and by 1957 India was in a foreign-exchange crisis that brought in import licensing and exchange control — a set of restrictions that outlived the Plan by a generation and was dismantled only after 1991. Planning itself has since ended: the Planning Commission was replaced by NITI Aayog in 2015, and the Twelfth Plan, which closed in 2017, was the last.

• The Second Plan ran from 1956 to 1961 and rested on the Mahalanobis four-sector model.
• The Industrial Policy Resolution of 30 April 1956 put seventeen industries in Schedule A as the exclusive responsibility of the State and twelve in Schedule B for progressive state ownership.
• Steel plants were built at Bhilai with Soviet collaboration, Rourkela with West German and Durgapur with British.
• The Plan targeted growth of about 4.5 per cent and achieved close to it, at roughly 4.27 per cent.
• The Planning Commission drafted the Plans, but the National Development Council gave final approval.

• Reading 'self-reliance' as a marker of the Second Plan; it is the vocabulary of the Third and the Fifth.
• Assuming every Plan that mentions industry means heavy industry — the Sixth turned towards infrastructure and away from it.
• Confusing the body that drafts a Plan with the body that approves it.

Asked as a slogan-to-Plan match, where the three wrong options are the objectives of other Plans quoted almost word for word.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Industrial Policy Resolution that reserved seventeen industries as the exclusive responsibility of the State was adopted in

  • (a)1948
  • (b)1951
  • (c)1956
  • (d)1966

  Answer(c) 1956 — placed before Parliament on 30 April 1956 and reprinted as an annexure to the Second Five Year Plan, whose industrial strategy it carried into law.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The removal of poverty and the attainment of self-reliance were the twin objectives of which Five Year Plan?

  • (a)Second
  • (b)Third
  • (c)Fifth
  • (d)Eighth

  Answer(c) Fifth — the Garibi Hatao plan of the mid-seventies, which also carried the Minimum Needs Programme.