Write short note with a sociological perspective: Five Year Plans (2013)
Read sociologically, the Five Year Plans (from 1951) are not a sequence of output targets but a sequence of official answers to the question what kind of society should India become. Each plan declared values before it allocated money — prior determination of objectives and a proclamation of values is the defining feature of planning — so the plans are the best available record of how the Indian state’s social imagination changed, and of who was expected to change with it.
The shifting social thrust
| Phase | Social objective declared | Sociological significance |
|---|---|---|
| First Plan (1951-56) | Agriculture, rehabilitation, the Community Development Programme (1952) | The village treated as a harmonious community needing technique, not redistribution |
| Second–Third (1956-66) | Heavy industry; the “socialistic pattern of society” accepted at Avadi | Change relocated to the city, the factory and the technically trained elite |
| Green Revolution years (from the mid-1960s) | Food self-sufficiency | A technological substitute for land reform; a new capitalist peasantry |
| Fourth–Fifth (1969-79) | Garibi Hatao, growth with justice, target groups; the Tribal Sub-Plan strategy | Poverty recognised as structural, and specific groups made objects of policy |
| Sixth–Seventh (1980-90) | Self-employment and asset transfer to poor households | Poverty redefined as a household deficit rather than a class relation |
| Eighth onward (1992-) | The state as facilitator after liberalisation; then “inclusive growth” and rights | Entitlements — employment guarantee (2005), forest rights (2006), education (2009) — replace targets |
| Twelfth (2012-17) | “Faster, more inclusive and sustainable growth” | The last plan; sustainability enters as a social value |
Who gained and who bore the cost
- Gained: industrial capital, which received infrastructure it could not have built; the rich peasantry of canal-irrigated tracts; and an urban professional-bureaucratic middle class that the plans themselves created through technical and management institutes.
- Bore the cost: tribal and rural communities displaced by dams, mines and townships — Walter Fernandes estimates over 60 million displaced or deprived of livelihood between 1947 and 2000, tribals about 40% of them, only around a third resettled in any planned way; landless labour in the eastern and central belt; and women, whose unpaid labour never entered a plan document.
How sociologists read them
- S. C. Dube’s India’s Changing Villages (1958) showed that the “felt needs” acted on by the plan machinery were the needs officials and dominant sections felt — elite capture is the plans’ recurring finding.
- A. R. Desai read the plans as state capitalism: the public sector socialised the costs of industrialisation and privatised its gains (India’s Path of Development, 1984).
- Francine Frankel (1971) named the trade-off precisely — economic gains bought at political and social cost.
- André Béteille held that formal equality can coexist with hardening inequality, which is why plan outlays raised averages while leaving hierarchies intact.
Conclusion
The Five Year Plans ended after the Twelfth, with NITI Aayog replacing the Planning Commission in 2015 and three-year, seven-year and fifteen-year documents replacing the Plan in 2017. Their sociological verdict stands: India planned an economy and hoped a society would follow. That the national Multidimensional Poverty Index still stood at 11.28% in 2022-23 shows how much of the unfinished agenda is social, not economic.