MPSC 2026 Prelims Paper-I · Question 39 of 100

Correct — option (2), '1951-56, 1969-74'. Notice first that all four options give the same period for the First Plan, 1951-56, so the first blank is decided before the candidate begins and the entire question turns on the second. The First Five Year Plan ran from 1951 to 1956, built on the Harrod-Domar model, with priority to agriculture, irrigation and power and with the Bhakra Nangal, Hirakud and Damodar Valley projects as its signature works. The Second Plan ran 1956-61 on the Mahalanobis model of heavy industry, the Third 1961-66. The Fourth Plan is where the arithmetic breaks, and that is precisely why it is asked. On a simple count of five-year blocks the Fourth Plan should have begun in 1966, but it did not. The Third Plan had been wrecked by the war with China in 1962, the war with Pakistan in 1965 and a severe drought, and the economy was in no condition to launch a new medium-term plan. The government therefore declared what is known as the Plan Holiday: three annual plans covering 1966-67, 1967-68 and 1968-69, during which the rupee was devalued and the new high-yielding variety seed programme was pushed forward. Regular five-year planning resumed only afterwards, so the Fourth Plan ran from 1969 to 1974, with the objectives of growth with stability and progressive achievement of self-reliance. That gives 1951-56 and 1969-74, which is option (2). The plan holiday is the single dislocation in the whole sequence, and every plan from the Fourth onwards is displaced by three years because of it — which is why a candidate who counts forward from 1951 in blocks of five, instead of remembering the break, will get every plan after the Third wrong.

• (1)1951-56, 1961-66 — 1961-66 is the period of the Third Five Year Plan, not the Fourth. That plan aimed at a self-reliant and self-generating economy and was derailed by the war with China in 1962, the war with Pakistan in 1965 and a severe drought — the very failures that produced the plan holiday and pushed the Fourth Plan back to 1969. A candidate who counts five-year blocks forward from 1951 without remembering the break arrives here, because 1961-66 is exactly where the third block falls.
• (3)1951-56, 1967-72 — 1967-72 corresponds to no plan period at all. It is a plausible-looking five-year window straddling the plan holiday, and it will attract a candidate who half-remembers that there was a break in the sequence but not how long it lasted. The holiday covered three annual plans across 1966-69, not one or two years, so regular planning resumed in 1969 and not in 1967. Nothing in the planning record begins in 1967.
• (4)1951-56, 1974-79 — 1974-79 is the period of the Fifth Five Year Plan, whose slogan was the removal of poverty and the attainment of self-reliance, and which was terminated a year early in 1978 by the Janata government in favour of a rolling plan. It follows the Fourth Plan rather than being it. This option is one place further along the sequence than the correct answer, which makes it the natural error for a candidate who has remembered the plan holiday but applied it twice.

India's Five Year Plans were prepared by the Planning Commission, set up by a cabinet resolution in March 1950 — an executive body with no constitutional or statutory foundation — and approved by the National Development Council, on which the states are represented. Each plan carried a distinguishing objective and an intellectual model. The First Plan, 1951-56, applied the Harrod-Domar framework and concentrated on agriculture, irrigation and power in the aftermath of Partition and the food crisis. The Second, 1956-61, followed P.C. Mahalanobis in giving priority to heavy industry and the capital goods sector, and it is the plan associated with the Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956 and the public sector steel plants at Bhilai, Rourkela and Durgapur. The Third, 1961-66, sought a self-reliant and self-generating economy and failed under the pressure of two wars and drought. After the plan holiday of 1966-69, the Fourth Plan, 1969-74, adopted growth with stability and self-reliance as its aims and coincided with the nationalisation of major commercial banks. The Fifth, 1974-79, took up poverty removal directly. The sequence continued, with a further interruption at the end of the 1970s, until the Twelfth Plan of 2012-17, after which the Planning Commission had already been replaced by NITI Aayog from 1 January 2015.

The plan holiday is the hinge of this whole chronology and is worth understanding rather than memorising. Three shocks arrived together in the mid-1960s: the border war with China in 1962 diverted resources to defence, the war with Pakistan in 1965 did so again and triggered a suspension of foreign aid, and successive monsoon failures in 1965 and 1966 produced a food crisis severe enough to make the country dependent on imported grain. Foreign exchange reserves collapsed, the rupee was devalued in June 1966, and medium-term planning was suspended in favour of three annual plans. The same crisis produced the policy turn that mattered most: the shift to high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice with assured irrigation and fertiliser, which became the Green Revolution. So the gap in the plan sequence is not an administrative curiosity — it marks the point at which Indian economic policy changed direction, and questions on the Fourth Plan's dates are, in effect, questions about whether the candidate knows that.

• First Five Year Plan, 1951-56 — based on the Harrod-Domar model, with priority to agriculture, irrigation and power; the Bhakra Nangal, Hirakud and Damodar Valley projects belong to this period, and the plan exceeded its modest growth target.
• Second Plan, 1956-61 — built on P.C. Mahalanobis's model of heavy industry and capital goods, accompanied by the Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956 and the establishment of the public sector steel plants at Bhilai, Rourkela and Durgapur. Third Plan, 1961-66 — aimed at a self-reliant, self-generating economy and failed under war and drought.
• Plan Holiday, 1966-69 — three annual plans replaced the Fourth Five Year Plan after the wars of 1962 and 1965 and the droughts of the mid-1960s. The rupee was devalued in 1966 and the high-yielding variety seed programme that became the Green Revolution was launched in this window.
• Fourth Plan, 1969-74 — objectives of growth with stability and progressive achievement of self-reliance; the period of the Gadgil formula for central assistance to states and of the nationalisation of major commercial banks in 1969. Fifth Plan, 1974-79 — poverty removal and self-reliance, terminated a year early in 1978, followed by a rolling plan.
• The Planning Commission was created by a cabinet resolution in March 1950 and was neither a constitutional nor a statutory body; plans were approved by the National Development Council. It was replaced by NITI Aayog with effect from 1 January 2015, and the Twelfth Plan, 2012-17, was the last.

• Counting plan periods forward in blocks of five from 1951. The plan holiday of 1966-69 displaces every plan from the Fourth onwards by three years, so mechanical counting gets the First, Second and Third right and everything after them wrong.
• Confusing the Fourth Plan with the Fifth. 1969-74 is the Fourth and 1974-79 the Fifth; both are real periods, which is why an option offering the wrong one of the two is far more dangerous than an option offering an invented date.
• Assuming the plan holiday lasted one or two years. It covered three annual plans across 1966-69, which is why no plan period begins in 1967 or 1968 — a fact that disposes of any option built around those years.

Plan chronology is examined in three shapes: the direct period question used here; the objective-or-model question, which asks what a named plan aimed at or whose model it followed; and the event-to-plan question, placing bank nationalisation, the devaluation, a steel plant or a slogan in the right plan. All three are answered from one table — plan number, period, objective, model or slogan, and one landmark event — and the table is only reliable if the plan holiday is marked in it, because that is where the arithmetic and the history part company. Note the construction of this question too: every option repeats the same first blank, so the paper is really asking a single fact, and there is no benefit in checking the First Plan's dates at all.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The period 1966-69 in India's planning history, during which three annual plans were implemented instead of a five year plan, is known as :

  • (a)The Rolling Plan
  • (b)The Plan Holiday
  • (c)The Interim Plan
  • (d)The Transitional Plan

  Answer(b) The Plan Holiday — medium-term planning was suspended after the wars of 1962 and 1965 and the droughts of the mid-1960s, and three annual plans covered 1966-69, during which the rupee was devalued and the high-yielding variety programme began. The Rolling Plan is a different episode, adopted for 1978-80 after the Fifth Plan was terminated early.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Second Five Year Plan, which gave priority to heavy industry and the capital goods sector, was based on the model developed by :

  • (a)P.C. Mahalanobis
  • (b)Roy Harrod and Evsey Domar
  • (c)V.K.R.V. Rao
  • (d)D.R. Gadgil

  Answer(a) P.C. Mahalanobis — his two-sector and four-sector models made the expansion of the capital goods sector the route to long-run growth, and shaped the Second Plan of 1956-61 alongside the Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956. The Harrod-Domar framework underlay the First Plan, and D.R. Gadgil is remembered for the formula governing central assistance to state plans.