The periods of the First and Fourth Five Year Plans are ________ and ________ respectively.

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

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

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2026 Q39 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q39 — Economy PYQ with Answer