MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 54 of 100

Correct — option (4), 'a, b, c and d'. The four statements between them reproduce the standard textbook list of requisites for successful economic planning, and the list is cumulative rather than alternative: nothing in it can be dropped without the plan failing at some stage. Read as a sequence, the statements follow the actual life of a plan. Statement a. covers what is needed before anything can be drafted — a central planning authority to do the drafting, which in India was the Planning Commission; reliable statistical data, because a plan is a set of quantitative decisions and cannot be made from impressions; and a clear statement of objectives, since an authority with data and no aims has nothing to plan towards. Statement b. covers the drafting itself: targets and priorities have to be fixed, because a plan that wants everything at once has decided nothing, and resources have to be mobilised through taxation, savings, borrowing and external finance, since a target with no money behind it is an aspiration. Statement c. moves to execution, where plans most often break down. An honest and efficient administration is what turns an allocation into a completed asset, and corruption or incapacity in the implementing machinery defeats even a well-drafted plan; a proper development policy is needed so that the plan's targets are matched by the surrounding framework of prices, industrial policy and public investment rather than being contradicted by it. Statement d. names two supporting conditions that are easy to overlook. Economy in administration means that the plan's resources are not consumed by the machinery that administers it, an especially serious matter where revenue is scarce. An education base is needed because plans are executed by people: the technicians, administrators, accountants and skilled workers a plan requires have to exist before the plan can use them, which is why human capital is a precondition of development and not merely one of its fruits. Every statement therefore belongs, and option (4) is the answer. This question prints no closing 'which of the statements' line; the choices follow the list directly, and the word 'Incorrupt' in statement c. is as printed and means free from corruption.

• (1)a only — This option keeps only the preconditions of drafting — the planning authority, the data and the objectives — and stops there, which describes what is needed to begin a plan rather than what is needed for it to succeed. The stem asks for both formulation and success, and success is decided in the stages this option discards. A plan drawn up by a competent authority on good data and towards clear objectives will still fail if no resources are mobilised for it, if its targets are never fixed, if the administration that implements it is corrupt or incapable, or if the country lacks the trained people to carry out the work. Choosing this option usually means the candidate has stopped reading at the point where the list ceases to describe institutions and begins to describe conditions.
• (2)a and b — This option carries the list as far as the drafting stage — authority, data, objectives, targets, priorities and resources — and then stops before implementation, which is precisely where Indian planning has most often been criticised for falling short. The gap between plan outlays and plan achievements is a standing theme in every review of the Five Year Plans, and the reasons given are almost always the ones this option discards: delays and leakages in administration, policies working against the plan's own targets, and shortages of trained personnel. A plan is a statement of intent until it is executed, so a list of requirements for success that omits the conditions of execution is incomplete in the part that matters most.
• (3)a, b and c — This is the most attractive of the wrong answers, because it takes the list through drafting and implementation and drops only the last pair, which reads as the least weighty of the four. Neither item in it can be spared, though. Economy in administration matters because the resources a poor country mobilises for a plan are limited, and every rupee absorbed by the administrative machinery is a rupee that does not reach the project; a plan whose overheads grow faster than its outlays defeats itself. An education base matters because the whole apparatus of planning — surveys, engineering, accounting, supervision, technical operation — runs on trained people, and a country that has not built that base cannot execute an ambitious plan however well financed it is. Dropping this statement mistakes an enabling condition for an optional extra.

Economic planning is the deliberate direction of a country's resources towards chosen objectives over a stated period, and textbook treatments set out its requisites as a chain that runs from preparation through drafting to execution. Preparation requires an authority empowered to plan, a statistical system capable of supplying reliable data, and an agreed set of objectives. Drafting requires targets, priorities among them, an assessment of the resources available and a means of mobilising more, and internal consistency between the parts of the plan so that the output one sector is asked to deliver matches the input another is expected to use. Execution requires an administration that is both honest and capable, a surrounding policy framework that supports rather than contradicts the plan's targets, restraint in administrative expenditure, and a supply of educated and trained people to do the work. Public cooperation is commonly added as a final requisite, on the reasoning that a plan pursued against the grain of the society it governs will be evaded rather than implemented. India's own institutional history illustrates the first requisite: the Planning Commission was created in March 1950 to discharge exactly that function, drew up twelve Five Year Plans, and was replaced by NITI Aayog on 1 January 2015 when the government took the view that a different kind of body was needed.

This question and the one immediately before it both come from the planning chapter of the economy syllabus, and both use the same construction — a cumulative list presented as though the candidate had to choose among its parts. Recognising the construction is half the work: when the options build up in sequence, a only, then a and b, then a, b and c, then all four, the question is asking where the list stops, and the honest way to answer is to test whether each successive item is genuinely required rather than to guess at a natural stopping point. Here nothing can be dropped, because each item names a distinct way in which a plan can fail. The Commission also uses these questions to test whether a candidate understands planning as a process rather than as an institution. A candidate who thinks of planning as what the Planning Commission did may hesitate over statement a. now that the body no longer exists, but the requisite is for a planning authority, and the replacement of one such body by another does not remove the requirement for one. Reading a list of requisites as a set of failure modes — no data, no targets, no money, no honest administration, no trained people — makes it both memorable and usable.

• The standard requisites of successful economic planning are conventionally grouped as a planning authority, statistical data and objectives; targets, priorities and mobilisation of resources; honest and efficient administration and a supporting development policy; and economy in administration together with an educational base.
• Reliable statistical data is a precondition of planning because a plan is a set of quantitative decisions about targets and allocations, and cannot be framed from qualitative impressions.
• Mobilisation of resources through taxation, domestic savings, borrowing and external finance is what converts a plan's targets into financed commitments rather than statements of intent.
• Implementation failures — delays, leakages and administrative incapacity — are the reason most often given for the gap between plan outlays and plan achievements in India, which is why honest and efficient administration is listed as a requisite.
• India's planning authority was the Planning Commission, set up in March 1950, which drew up twelve Five Year Plans before being replaced by NITI Aayog on 1 January 2015.

• Stopping the list at the drafting stage and leaving out the conditions of implementation, where plans most often fail
• Dismissing economy in administration and the educational base as minor, when both are conditions on whether a plan can be carried out at all
• Rejecting the reference to a planning commission because that particular body no longer exists, when the requisite is for a planning authority of some kind
• Treating a cumulative option ladder as an invitation to find a natural stopping point rather than testing whether each item is genuinely required

Planning theory questions in MPSC papers take the shape of requisite lists, definitions of types of planning, and institutional questions about the bodies that plan. The Commission favours the cumulative option ladder seen here because it discriminates between a candidate who has learnt the list and one who has a general impression of the topic, and it is used across the syllabus wherever a textbook presents an enumerated set. The defence is always the same: read the statements as independent claims, test each on its own, and let the option follow from the verdicts rather than choosing an option and then justifying it. Since the Five Year Plans have ended, questions on planning increasingly mix the theory of planning with the institutional change to NITI Aayog, so both are worth holding together.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following is regarded as a requisite for the successful implementation, as distinct from the mere formulation, of an economic plan ?

  • (a)The availability of reliable statistical data
  • (b)A clear statement of the plan's objectives
  • (c)An honest and efficient administrative machinery
  • (d)The fixation of targets and priorities

  Answer(c) An honest and efficient administrative machinery — data, objectives and targets all belong to the stage at which a plan is drawn up, whereas implementation depends on the machinery that converts allocations into completed projects. The gap between plan outlays and plan achievements in India has been attributed chiefly to failures at this stage, through delays, leakages and shortages of capacity, rather than to defects in the drafting.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Why is an educational base treated as a precondition of successful economic planning rather than merely as one of its results ?

  • (a)Because education is included among the objectives of every plan
  • (b)Because a plan requires trained technical, administrative and skilled personnel to execute it
  • (c)Because educated citizens pay more taxes
  • (d)Because literacy is used as the measure of a plan's success

  Answer(b) Because a plan requires trained technical, administrative and skilled personnel to execute it — surveys, engineering, accounting, supervision and technical operation all depend on people who must already exist when the plan begins. Human capital is therefore a condition of development and not only one of its fruits, which is why the educational base appears in the standard list of requisites alongside honest administration and economy in administrative expenditure.