Planning, democracy and an idea of India

Planning for Democracy: How A Professor, An Institute and An Idea Shaped India

Author: Nikhil Menon

Publisher: Penguin 

Pages: 312

Price: Rs 800

Back in 2012, modelling my experience with the compilation of the history of the Reserve Bank of India, I suggested to the Planning Commission that it let me write a history of this institution based on its files. Nothing came of it despite the best efforts of Sindhushri Khullar, who was then its administrative head. So it’s good to see that someone else has done it without, I think, much official help.

This is an excellent book on a dull subject by a young scholar who obtained his PhD from Princeton University. It appears to have been provoked by the abolition of the Planning Commission in 2014. It is rich in forgotten detail.

Nikhil Menon writes in an engagingly chatty way.

It has three broad themes: Planning, democracy and their coming together to build a modern India, rather in the manner of the Indian Constitution. It tries to take the best bits of planning and democracy.

Happily for the reader it’s most emphatically not a dreary history of the five year plans, the sort of thing that many economists have attempted. Instead, it is about how the government of the day went about getting such an idea accepted and implemented. That wasn’t easy.

We have forgotten now that in the beginning only a few wanted a planned economy. India’s second finance minister, John Mathai, even resigned because he said the Commission would be a Super Cabinet — which is exactly what Sonia Gandhi created in 2004 with her National Advisory Council, which took its cue from compassion rather than economics. Dr Menon tells us how difficult it is to get official documents. One high-ranking official of the Planning Commission told him it was most probably because ignorant— the Urdu word jahil is better —  babus had destroyed them.

That seems entirely possible because a retired secretary in the finance ministry once told me that when he came out of his room one evening, he found dozens of files on the floor outside the door, possibly awaiting destruction by the monkeys that infested North Block. The files turned out to be ones pertaining to the division of assets between India and Pakistan during 1947-49.

Balle, balle!

Dr Menon’s reason for writing this book is that he sees “planning as a lens through which to understand the Indian state and the nature of Indian democracy.” That certainly is a new angle. This, therefore, “is a history of the Nehruvian state told through the prism of planning, rather than an economic history of planning…”

Thus, he says, “India’s experience with economic planning has to be understood through the frame of technocracy and technology on the one hand and the political projects of democratic planning on the other.”

The description of the efforts of

P C Mahalanobis is riveting, if a little sketchy, and a must read because it reveals how far ahead the good doctor thought. He realised planning would be impossible without data and started a whole range of initiatives to collect it and analyse it.

One enduring creation was the National Sample Survey. Another was the Indian Statistical Institute, which is one of the finest in the world. He even contacted the Americans to build a computer for parallel processing. The Americans said no.

Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahalanobis latched on to each other from about 1940 when they first met at the home of Rabindranath Tagore. They played footsie over data and then it blew up into a full-fledged affair over planning. Mahalanobis was entrusted with the Second Five Year Plan and the rest is history.

Politically, however, since hardly anyone understood planning, the Nehru government embarked on a mass education programme that was exactly like the ones the Modi government runs. The purpose was to make planning intelligible and thus acceptable. Dr Menon’s description of all that is poignant because it shows how important it is to get popular acceptance of a new idea. The photo collection is especially nostalgic.

Dr Menon has wisely placed his acknowledgements at the end of the book. It’s replete with the names of left-leaning historians, especially those who taught at Ramjas College in Delhi and, of course, at that 1,000-acre compound for the leftists that Indira Gandhi built in the 1970, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Fortunately, Dr Menon’s account of the period is bias-free, except for his admiration for the efforts to involve “the People” in what was essentially an exercise in investment planning to achieve efficient resource allocation.

One last comment: The Nehru-Indira years were dominated by India’s elite without a “subaltern” in sight. It’s a pity that this obvious point escaped

Dr Menon’s notice. But who said we can have it all in just one book?