Which of the following statements is correct?.
- (a)The five-year plan focuses mostly on private intervention in the economy.
- (b)The five-year plan permits long-term intervention by the government in the economy.
- (c)The five-year plan always focused on the growth of the tertiary sector.
- (d)A five-year plan always stresses market-oriented activities.
Answer
Why
Correct — B. A Five-Year Plan is the state's own instrument. The government fixes targets, allocates public investment and steers resources over a five-year horizon, which is long-term intervention by the government in the economy by definition.
India adopted the device on Soviet lines, ran the First Plan from 1951 to 1956, and kept planning going until the Twelfth Plan ended in 2017.
Why the others are wrong
- (a)The five-year plan focuses mostly on private intervention in the economy. — A plan written and funded by the state is not a private instrument. Private investment was licensed and steered by the plans, never the thing the plans were built around.
- (c)The five-year plan always focused on the growth of the tertiary sector. — The word always breaks it. The First Plan led with agriculture and the Second with heavy industry, so no one sector held the focus throughout.
- (d)A five-year plan always stresses market-oriented activities. — Market-oriented is the opposite of planned allocation. Even after 1991 loosened controls, the plan document remained a statement of public priorities and public outlay.
Concept
Planning in India was a deliberate choice to let the state set the direction of a mixed economy. The Planning Commission, set up by a Cabinet resolution in March 1950, drafted the plans and the National Development Council approved them.
Each plan named priorities and an outlay: the First leaned on agriculture and the Harrod-Domar model, the Second on heavy industry and the Mahalanobis model.
The machinery changed in 2015, when NITI Aayog replaced the Planning Commission as a policy think tank without the plans' allocation powers.
The stem is loosely worded and none of the four options is a textbook sentence. Decide it on the one idea that is true of every plan: planning means the state acting on the economy over a long horizon.
Key facts
- The Planning Commission was set up by a Cabinet resolution in March 1950 and the First Five-Year Plan ran from 1951 to 1956.
- The Second Plan (1956-61) followed the Mahalanobis model and put heavy industry first.
- NITI Aayog replaced the Planning Commission on 1 January 2015.
- The Twelfth Plan (2012-17) was the last Five-Year Plan.
Study next
Common traps
- Reading planning as anti-private, when the plans regulated private investment rather than excluding it.
- Treating one sector as the permanent focus of planning when the priority changed plan by plan.
Five-Year Plan items recur across this cycle, usually as a model-to-plan or slogan-to-plan match — also asked 11 Sep 2024, 16:00, General Awareness Q.23 (the Mahalanobis model) and 18 Sep 2024, 09:00, General Awareness Q.12 (the Harrod-Domar model).
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.