The largest share of allocation in the Seventh Five Year Plan went to the :

Question

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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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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.  (b) 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.  (d) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2024 Q48 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q48 — Economy PYQ with Answer