Write short note: Planned development in a democracy. (1985)
Planned development means directing resources towards goals fixed in advance; democracy means accepting that those goals may be rejected at the next election. India after 1947 attempted both at once — universal adult franchise alongside centralised five-year planning. The combination was without precedent, since planning elsewhere had been the work of authoritarian states.
The Indian design
The Planning Commission (1950) and the First Five-Year Plan placed a mixed economy under state direction; the Second Plan (1956), built on the model devised by P. C. Mahalanobis, committed India to heavy industry and a “socialistic pattern of society”. Crucially, the surplus for industrialisation was to be raised without coercing the peasantry as the Soviet model had done. Jawaharlal Nehru‘s wager was that planning would supply the long-range rationality democracy lacks, while democracy would supply the consent planning lacks.
The structural tension
- Time horizons conflict. Plans need continuity over decades; competitive elections reward visible short-term transfers.
- Implementation is weak. Gunnar Myrdal (Asian Drama, 1968) described South Asian polities as “soft states” — willing to legislate redistribution, unwilling to enforce it against those who elect them. India’s land reforms, the plans’ central redistributive promise, were diluted precisely this way, through ceiling exemptions and benami transfers.
- Planners are not neutral. A. R. Desai (State and Society in India, 1975) read the planning state as a capitalist state whose development protected propertied classes; Francine Frankel showed that keeping dominant landed castes inside the ruling coalition blunted every redistributive measure.
Democratising the plan
- Decentralisation. The Balwantrai Mehta Committee (1957) proposed democratic decentralisation, and the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments (1992) gave panchayats and municipalities constitutional standing, with the gram sabha as the base planning unit.
- Participatory planning. Kerala’s People’s Plan Campaign (1996) devolved around 35 per cent of the state’s plan outlay to local bodies and drew ordinary citizens into drafting projects — India’s most serious attempt to make planning itself democratic, and the base on which Kudumbashree’s neighbourhood women’s networks were later built.
- Rights and audit. The Right to Information Act, 2005 and the statutory social audit under the rural employment guarantee law of 2005 turned intended beneficiaries into auditors of the plan.
- Institutional shift. The Planning Commission gave way to NITI Aayog (2015), which advises and benchmarks states rather than allocating plan funds — planning recast as cooperative federalism.
Assessment
Democracy slows planning but also corrects it. Amartya Sen‘s finding that no substantial famine has occurred in a functioning democracy with a free press is the strongest evidence that public accountability is itself a development input. Conversely, India’s largest development failures — mass displacement without rehabilitation, unenforced land ceilings — occurred where planning proceeded without the consent of those it rearranged.
Conclusion
Planned development in a democracy is not a compromise between efficiency and freedom but a distinct method: goals argued in public, revised by evidence, corrected by dissent. The Indian record suggests the method works best when planning is pushed downward to those whose lives the plan proposes to change.