A plan for a nation | Book review: ‘Planning Democracy’ by Nikhil Menon

By Amitabha Bhattacharya

In the summer of 1915, when bombs were devastating Europe, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, having completed his undergraduate studies in Cambridge with ‘the sole First Class in his physics cohort’ and a coveted research scholarship in hand, was planning to return home when his tutor drew his attention to bound volumes of Biometrika, a journal of statistics. That moment was epiphanous for Mahalanobis, and through him later, transformatory for a newly independent India.

While Jawaharlal Nehru’s spell, especially over educated Indians, is well known, not much is known about Mahalanobis and his influence as a builder of modern India. How a physicist-turned-statistician with no training in economics rose to acquire a formidable global reputation and made economists from VKRV Rao, KN Raj to Amartya Sen and even Jagdish Bhagwati “euphoric about the Mahalanobis plan frame” was a story waiting to be told.

A political process that started in 1938, with Subhas Bose as the Congress president and his compatriot Nehru as chairman of the newly set up National Planning Committee, and captured the country’s imagination over the five-year plans, ended in 2015 with the Planning Commission being replaced by the NITI Aayog.

This book is a compelling narrative of the rise and eventual decline of centralised planning as a credo. An absorbing story of pioneering thinkers like Mahalanobis and political leaders like Nehru and of their ideas in shaping planned national development in the 1950s and early 1960s. Consequently, we learn of Mahalanobis and his seminal role in introducing statistics as a discipline in India through the establishment of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), in formulating the crucial Second Five-Year Plan (1956-61) with focus on public sector and import substituting industrialisation, as also in creating the enormous data infrastructure that is now being appreciated even when centralised planning has largely been abandoned.

But this work is not a biography of Mahalanobis or of his far-reaching and fundamental contributions to statistics. The book demystifies many prevalent myths, shows how key individuals and institutions interacted, and highlights the enormity of problems that technocrats, bureaucrats and political functionaries had encountered and came to terms with, all sharing a broad vision and zeal to spur national regeneration.

Nikhil Menon chronicles how the idea of a technocratic planning envisioned by Mahalanobis and others was sought to be fused with democratic norms and aspirations. This was a Herculean task and the results were not wholly satisfactory. Why was this so?

Couldn’t the fault lines be anticipated? Menon’s masterly sweep tries to capture the process and its inherent complexities and contradictions. As appropriately observed, “Between the atom bomb dropping in Hiroshima and the fall of the Berlin Wall, planning stalked the global policy landscape. Far from being an Indian oddity, it drew legitimacy from an international push during the Second World War…Varying combinations of planning, protectionism and state-led democratic development were coming to be fused with anti-imperialism and the fight against the perceived threat of neo-colonialism…” In the 1950s and 1960s, it was “tempting to describe the history of development as a history of planning…” Not in totalitarian regimes alone, but in social democracies and welfare states as well.

However, the path for democratic India had to be carved out differently from that followed by Russia and China. The book is divided into two parts. The first part, Data, is covered in three chapters—A Nation in Numbers, Calcutta Conquers Delhi and Chasing Computers. The second part, Democracy, comprises two chapters: Help the Plan—Help Yourself and Salvation in Service, followed by extensive notes and a select bibliography. Taken together, it profiles “a history of Nehruvian state told through the prism of planning”, a story interspersed with interesting facts and unknown bits of personality traits and clashes. It also touches upon why the vision gradually faded over the years.

Nehru’s reliance on Mahalanobis and the latter’s role in making data and statistics integral to the formulation of plans were considered appropriate for the time, though there were some dissenting voices to their state-dominated approach. The differences between individuals apart, there were major areas of friction and turf war between institutions as well. Nehru, Chintaman Deshmukh, Mahalanobis on one side and BR Shenoi, CN Vakil, Minoo Masani, etc, on the other. As also between the ISI, the Planning Commission and the finance ministry. JB Kripalani was critical for the plan’s shift from Gandhian ideas. Rajagopalachari wrote to Nehru, “I fear a church is growing around the God of Planning.” But the national and international standing of Mahalanobis and Nehru, head and shoulder above their contemporaries, helped the Second Plan sail through, making bold and significant beginnings.

The march of mixed economy with massive industrialisation by the state appeared unstoppable.

Accounts as that of the talented Morton Nadler who, having renounced both American and Czech citizenship, came to spend over a year (1959-60) at the ISI, working on India’s first electronic computer and training graduate students in computer hardware, make fascinating reading. Then came the tussle between Mahalanobis and Bhabha, between ISI and TIFR. “When Bombay didn’t have its own computer, the Atomic Energy Commission’s secret calculations were sent to Calcutta to be solved at the Institute’s computers…” The Big Data Revolution that we talk about today had much of its genesis in the action of Mahalanobis.

The second part of the book covers how the centralised planning was sought to be coupled with wider public participation in an honest attempt to make planning a democratic exercise, and seeking to bridge ‘Plan and People’. In order to instill ‘plan-consciousness’, through intensive publicity at all levels, even the platform of the Kumbh Mela was used and the involvement of Bharatiya Sadhu Samaj and the like encouraged. A Bollywood film like Naya Daur reflected the new mood, film artistes like Meena Kumari were used to spread the gospel of planning as a key to national prosperity. In Nehru’s India, according to a noted sociologist, what was attempted was a “transference of allegiance from Ram-rajya to a planned social order… from sacrifice to planned endeavour.”

However, despite the best of intentions, planning remained essentially a top-down exercise. With the passage of time, it started losing its lustre. As Menon observes perceptively, “Ordinary citizens could support in implementing the plans but could not participate in their design… Either way, planning was better at building data capacities than at improving the quality of Indian democracy. The history of Indian planning teaches us how different it looked in its technocratic and democratic realms, their dissonance running like a fracture through the project of planned modernity in a democracy.”

Written in a most elegant manner, and based on meticulous research, the book provides a magnificent panorama of India’s engagement with development planning, of the lessons learnt therefrom as also of the way scientific minds, Mahalanobis and Nehru in particular, had worked to steer the free nation through the tumultuous initial phase.

Anyone interested in the history of modern India and the nation-building exercise will find the book unputdownable.

Amitabha Bhattacharya is a former IAS officer who has also worked in the private sector and with the UNDP

Planning Democracy: How a Professor, an Institute, and an Idea Shaped India
Nikhil Menon
Penguin Random House
Pp 360, Rs 799