Choose the correct pair from the following options.

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, First Five-Year Plan – Focus on Agriculture. The First Plan ran from 1951 to 1956, was drawn on the Harrod–Domar model, and its declared motto was the development of agriculture. The reason was immediate rather than ideological: Partition had cut India off from the canal-irrigated wheat lands of west Punjab and from the jute of east Bengal, refugees had to be resettled, and foodgrain output had to be raised before anything else could be attempted. The money followed the priority — of a planned outlay of about 2,069 crore rupees, 27.2 per cent went to irrigation and energy and 17.4 per cent to agriculture and community development, against only 8.6 per cent for industry. The great multipurpose river valley projects belong to this Plan: Bhakra on the Sutlej, Hirakud on the Mahanadi and the Damodar Valley dams, all conceived to deliver irrigation, flood control and power together. It was also the only Plan comfortably to beat its own target, aiming at 2.1 per cent annual growth of gross domestic product and achieving 3.6 per cent, helped by good monsoons; per capita income rose about 8 per cent over the period. Every other pair on this page attaches a Plan to a focus that belonged to some other Plan or to no Plan at all, so (b) is the only pair in which both halves match. The one caution worth stating plainly is about the option's own phrasing: 'Focus on Agriculture' is a compression. The First Plan gave priority to agriculture, irrigation and power together and explicitly set out to lay foundations for industry as well; it did not ignore industry, it simply put agriculture first.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Wrong twice over. There has never been a 'Third-Year Plan' — the booklet prints it that way where its three siblings say 'Five-Year Plan', and the misprint is the Commission's own and is reproduced here rather than repaired. And globalisation was the declared focus of no numbered Plan: the reforms of July 1991 fell in the gap between the Seventh Plan and the Eighth, during the two Annual Plans of 1990 to 1992, and the Eighth Plan of 1992 to 1997 was merely the first to be drawn up afterwards.  (c) The focus named belongs to a different Plan. Industry — specifically heavy and basic industry on the Mahalanobis model — was the thrust of the SECOND Plan of 1956 to 1961, which built the steel plants at Bhilai with Soviet help, Durgapur with British and Rourkela with West German. The Fifth Plan of 1974 onward stressed employment, poverty alleviation under the Garibi Hatao banner and self-reliance, and introduced the Minimum Needs Programme.  (d) No Plan was ever built around the service sector. The Fourth Plan, 1969 to 1974, was framed on the Gadgil formula around 'growth with stability and progressive achievement of self-reliance', and its landmarks were the nationalisation of fourteen major banks in 1969, the spread of the Green Revolution and the introduction of a buffer stock of foodgrains. Services became India's largest sector by output only decades later, and by growth rather than by plan.

Concept: India ran twelve Five-Year Plans between 1951 and 2017, drawn up by the Planning Commission — a body created by a Cabinet resolution in March 1950, never mentioned in the Constitution — and finally approved by the National Development Council. The sequence of declared priorities is the examinable core. First (1951–56): agriculture, irrigation and power, on the Harrod–Domar model. Second (1956–61): heavy and basic industry, on the Mahalanobis model, alongside the Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956. Third (1961–66): self-sustaining growth, wrecked by the wars of 1962 and 1965 and the drought of 1964–65, achieving only 2.4 per cent against a target of 5.6, and followed by three Annual Plans, the 'plan holiday' of 1966 to 1969. Fourth (1969–74): growth with stability and self-reliance. Fifth (1974–79): poverty removal, cut short in 1978 when the Janata government rejected it. Sixth (1980–85) and Seventh (1985–90). Two Annual Plans (1990–92) covering the reforms. Eighth (1992–97): the first to name human development as the core of development effort, and the Plan in which industrial licensing was effectively abolished. The Twelfth (2012–17) was the last; the Planning Commission was replaced by NITI Aayog on 1 January 2015.

State PCS 2025 Q46 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q46 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer