Who opposed Planned Development in India ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, Mahatma Gandhi. Of the four names, three are the very people who built and ran India's planning system, and only one argued against the model it rested on. Gandhi's objection was not to forethought about the economy but to the kind of development planning implied: centrally directed, state-led, machine-intensive and city-centred growth. From Hind Swaraj (1909) onwards he attacked modern industrial civilisation itself, and his positive programme was the opposite of a central plan — gram swaraj, the self-reliant village as the unit of the political and economic order, khadi and village industries as the base of employment, and trusteeship rather than either state ownership or unrestrained private capital. He organised that programme through bodies like the All India Spinners' Association and the All India Village Industries Association rather than through a planning apparatus. When the Congress set up the National Planning Committee in 1938 under Nehru's chairmanship, its premises were industrial and Gandhi did not share them, and in a well-known exchange of letters in 1945 he told Nehru that he still stood by the village-centred order of Hind Swaraj, to which Nehru replied that the village was backward and that India would need industry. One honest qualification a student should carry: Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948, more than two years before the Planning Commission was created in March 1950, so what he opposed was the model and its assumptions, not the institution. His alternative outlived him — a 'Gandhian Plan' was drawn up on his lines in 1944 by Shriman Narayan Agarwal, and Jayaprakash Narayan's Sarvodaya Plan of 1950 continued the argument.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The exact opposite — Nehru is the architect of Indian planning. He chaired the Congress's National Planning Committee from 1938, was ex-officio chairman of the Planning Commission set up in March 1950, and drove the Second Five Year Plan's Mahalanobis strategy of building basic and capital-goods industries. He is the man who described the great dams and steel plants as the temples of modern India.  (c) She extended planning rather than opposing it. As Prime Minister she chaired the Planning Commission, ran the Fourth and Fifth Plans, nationalised the major banks in 1969 and fought the 1971 election on 'Garibi Hatao' — a state-led, redistributive programme that assumed a planned economy.  (d) Rajiv Gandhi was impatient with the Planning Commission's bureaucratic style and began loosening industrial controls, but that is criticism of how planning was practised, not opposition to planned development. The Seventh Five Year Plan (1985-90), with its technology missions, ran under his government.

Concept: Two rival visions of development competed in the national movement. The dominant one, associated with Nehru, M. Visvesvaraya's Planned Economy for India (1934), the Congress's National Planning Committee (1938) and the industrialists' Bombay Plan (1944), held that a poor agrarian country could only escape poverty through rapid, state-directed industrialisation. The Gandhian vision held that a machine-and-city model would concentrate wealth, destroy village crafts and deepen unemployment in a labour-surplus country, and that development should instead begin from the self-governing village, labour-intensive production for local needs, and voluntary restraint by the wealthy under trusteeship. Independent India adopted the first: the Planning Commission was created by a Cabinet resolution in March 1950 and the First Five Year Plan began in 1951. The Gandhian view survived as a strand in the Constitution's Directive Principles — Article 40 on village panchayats and Article 43 on cottage industries — and in the Sarvodaya and Bhoodan movements.

State PCS 2019 Q140 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q140 — Economy PYQ with Answer