MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 48 of 100

Correct — option (3), the Energy Sector. The Seventh Five Year Plan ran from 1985 to 1990 with a public-sector outlay of about Rs 1,80,000 crore, and of the heads into which that outlay was divided, energy took the single largest share — of the order of thirty per cent, more than any other sector received. The reason is straightforward once the decade is remembered. Through the late 1970s and early 1980s power shortage, not capital shortage, was the binding constraint on Indian industry: plants ran below capacity because supply was interrupted, peak deficits were chronic, and irrigation pumping in the Green Revolution belt had added a large new agricultural demand on the same grid. A plan whose declared objectives were food, work and productivity could not deliver any of the three without electricity — foodgrain output depended on pumped irrigation and on fertiliser plants that are themselves heavy consumers of power, employment depended on industry running at capacity, and productivity depended on modernising equipment that had to be run. So generation capacity, transmission, coal and petroleum absorbed the largest block of plan resources. The sector heads used in Indian planning are conventional and stable — agriculture and rural development, irrigation, energy, industry and minerals, transport, communications, social services — and the question is testing whether a candidate can recall which of them dominated this particular plan rather than whether they can reproduce a figure.

• (1)Agriculture and Communication Sector — Agriculture and communication are not grouped together in the plan's own classification of outlay: agriculture and rural development is one head, communications quite another, and pairing them produces a category that never appears in a plan document. Agriculture and rural development did receive a substantial share of the Seventh Plan — the plan's food and employment objectives depended on it — but it did not lead the allocation, and joining it to communications makes the choice wrong on its construction as well as on its total.
• (2)Industrial and Communication Sector — This pairs industry with communications, again a grouping the plan itself does not use. Industry and minerals is a head in its own right, and the Seventh Plan did continue the industrial modernisation and partial liberalisation associated with the middle of the decade, but industry's outlay stood below energy's. The pairing is designed to catch a candidate who remembers the Seventh Plan as the modernisation plan and assumes the modernised sector must therefore have received the most money, when in fact the modernisation depended on power being available first.
• (4)Transport and Communication Sector — Transport and communication is a genuine head of plan outlay and a large one, since railways alone absorb heavy investment, so this is the most credible of the three wrong choices and the one worth ruling out with care. It nevertheless stood below energy in the Seventh Plan. The distinction to hold on to is that transport carries goods that have already been produced, while power is an input into producing them at all, and the constraint the Seventh Plan was written to relieve was a production constraint — factories idle for want of electricity and irrigation pumps without supply.

Five year plan outlays are divided among a standard set of sector heads, and the share each head receives is a compact statement of what the planners believed the binding constraint of that period to be. In the earliest plans agriculture led, because food supply and the balance of payments both depended on it, and the Second Plan shifted decisively to industry under the Mahalanobis strategy of building heavy capital-goods capacity. From the 1970s onward energy rose to dominate, as generation capacity failed to keep pace with the demand created by industrialisation, rural electrification and pumped irrigation, and it held the largest share through the Seventh Plan. The Seventh Plan itself, running from 1985 to 1990, was framed around the objectives of food, work and productivity, targeted growth of about five per cent a year and exceeded it, and combined that emphasis on productivity and modernisation with a strong anti-poverty and employment programme, the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana being launched in its final year. It was also the last plan of the old sequence to run uninterrupted: the Eighth Plan was delayed by the political and balance-of-payments crisis at the start of the 1990s, and two annual plans covered 1990 to 1992 before it began.

MPSC tests the five year plans as a sequence of distinguishing features rather than as a body of statistics, and the most reliably examined facts are the period, the model or strategy, the declared objective, the growth target against achievement, one or two signature schemes, and the sector that dominated outlay. This question uses the last of those, and its distractors are built by inventing plausible-sounding composite sector names, which is a common device — a candidate who has never seen a plan outlay table may not notice that 'Agriculture and Communication Sector' is not a category anyone uses. The habit worth forming is to memorise the plan heads themselves, because recognising that a printed option is not a real head disposes of it before any comparison of amounts is needed.

• The Seventh Five Year Plan ran from 1985 to 1990 with a public-sector outlay of about Rs 1,80,000 crore, and the energy sector took the single largest share of that outlay, of the order of thirty per cent.
• The plan's declared objectives were food, work and productivity, and it aimed at annual growth of about five per cent, an ambition it exceeded over the plan period.
• Power shortage rather than capital shortage was the operative constraint on Indian industry through this period, with chronic peak deficits and industrial capacity idled by interruption of supply.
• The Jawahar Rozgar Yojana, a wage-employment programme formed by merging earlier rural employment schemes, was launched in 1989, in the final year of the Seventh Plan.
• The Seventh Plan was followed by two annual plans covering 1990 to 1992, because political instability and the balance-of-payments crisis delayed the start of the Eighth Plan until 1992.

• Accepting an invented composite sector name such as agriculture-and-communication, when plan outlay tables use a fixed and much narrower set of heads
• Assuming the sector a plan is remembered for emphasising in its rhetoric must also be the sector that received the largest outlay
• Confusing the Seventh Plan's objectives with the Sixth Plan's, since both carried strong anti-poverty and employment content
• Mixing up plan periods by a year, which is easy where a plan was preceded or followed by annual plans rather than by the next five year plan

Five year plan questions in MPSC papers are almost always single-fact recall — which plan ran in which years, which model underlay a plan, which plan launched a named scheme, which sector received the largest share — and the distractors are constructed either by shifting the period by one plan or by inventing a sector head that sounds official. Because the plans are a closed and finite list, the whole topic rewards a compact table learned once, with the period, objective, growth target and achievement, dominant sector and signature scheme for each. Expect the Seventh Plan to be examined alongside the Sixth, since the two share their anti-poverty emphasis and are the pair most often confused.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The objectives of the Seventh Five Year Plan (1985-90) are usually summarised by which of the following triads ?

  • (a)Growth, modernisation and self-reliance
  • (b)Food, work and productivity
  • (c)Removal of poverty and attainment of self-reliance
  • (d)Human development and employment generation

  Answer(b) Food, work and productivity — the Seventh Plan was framed around raising foodgrain output, expanding productive employment and improving productivity across sectors, and it launched the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana in 1989 in pursuit of the second of those. Removal of poverty and self-reliance is the formulation associated with the earlier plans of the 1970s and the Sixth Plan.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following pairs of years was covered by annual plans rather than by a five year plan ?

  • (a)1980 to 1982
  • (b)1985 to 1987
  • (c)1990 to 1992
  • (d)1997 to 1999

  Answer(c) 1990 to 1992 — the political instability and the balance-of-payments crisis at the turn of the decade delayed the Eighth Plan, so two annual plans bridged the gap after the Seventh Plan ended in 1990, and the Eighth Plan finally ran from 1992 to 1997. The other well-known interruption is the plan holiday of 1966 to 1969, after the Third Plan.