A fast revision cut of Class 12 Political Science, Politics in India Since Independence,
Chapter 3, Politics of Planned Development. Every definition, every date and every named fact
the paper asks for, with nothing in between. Read the full notes first; read this the morning of the
exam.
This chapter has been shortened. The text you have runs from the Orissa case to the
criticisms of the Third Plan and then stops. Several topics that older notes and older question
banks still discuss have been taken out of the chapter body:
- the Green Revolution
- how land reforms were actually carried out, or not carried out
- the White Revolution, milk cooperatives and Amul
- the Bihar famine and food zoning
- Charan Singh and the farmers’ case against the plans
- why the development strategy was abandoned in later years, although the chapter’s own
opening bullet still promises to explain it
But the exercise at the end of the chapter was not shortened with it. Exercise Question 4
is a matching question built on Charan Singh, the Bihar Famine, zoning and Verghese Kurien, and
Question 2 offers Cooperative Farming as one of its four choices. If you go hunting for these in the
chapter you will not find them, and you have not lost a page.
What to do about it. Everything in these short notes, and every question in the MCQ bank
and the important-questions post, comes from the text you actually have. The four pairs of Exercise
Question 4 are answered in full in our NCERT Solutions post for this chapter, with a note
saying which of them the chapter no longer supports. Learn those four pairs as bare facts, and spend
the rest of your time on what is below, which is where the marks are.
1 All the Definitions
Left. Those who are in favour of state control of the economy, and who prefer state
regulation over free competition.
Right. Those who believe that free competition and market economy alone ensure progress,
and that the government should not unnecessarily intervene in the economy.
Modernisation. The process, believed to be the same for every country as it was in the
West, that involves the breakdown of traditional social structures and the rise of capitalism and
liberalism. It was associated with growth, material progress and scientific rationality.
The liberal-capitalist model. The model of modern development followed in much of Europe
and the US, one of the two India had before it on the eve of Independence.
The socialist model. The model of modern development followed in the USSR, the other of
the two India had before it. Many Indian leaders were deeply impressed by it.
Planning Commission. A body set up in March 1950 by a simple resolution of the Government
of India, not by the Constitution. It had an advisory role, its recommendations became effective
only when the Union Cabinet approved them, and the Prime Minister was its Chairperson.
Five year plan. A document in which the Government of India sets out a plan for all its
income and expenditure for the next five years. Its advantage is that it lets the government focus
on the larger picture and make long-term intervention in the economy.
‘Non-plan’ budget. The part of the budget spent on routine items on a yearly basis.
‘Plan’ budget. The part of the budget spent on a five year basis, as per the priorities
fixed by the plan.
Bombay Plan. The joint proposal for setting up a planned economy that a section of the big
industrialists drafted in 1944. It wanted the state to take major initiatives in industrial and
other economic investments.
‘Plan holiday’. The break in the sequence of plans that the government took when the
Fourth Plan was due to start in 1966, because the novelty of planning had declined and India was
facing an acute economic crisis.
‘Socialist pattern of society’. The goal the Congress declared at its Avadi session, before
the Second Plan was finalised, and which was reflected in that Plan.
‘Urban bias’. The charge critics made against the plan strategies from the Third Plan
onwards, that they favoured the cities and industry over the countryside and agriculture.
NITI Aayog. The National Institution for Transforming India, the new institution with
which the Government of India replaced the Planning Commission. It came into existence on
1 January 2015.
2 The Dates You Must Not Mix Up
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1931 | P.C. Mahalanobis founds the Indian Statistical Institute |
| 1944 | A section of the big industrialists drafts the Bombay Plan |
| March 1950 | The Planning Commission is set up, by a simple resolution of the Government of India |
| 1951 to 1956 | The First Five Year Plan |
| December 1951 | The actual First Plan Document is released and generates a lot of excitement |
| 1955 to 1968 | The years in which the postage stamps at the start of the chapter were mostly issued |
| 1956 | The Second Five Year Plan is launched; excitement with planning is at its peak |
| 1961 | The Third Five Year Plan |
| 1966 | The Fourth Plan was due to start; the government takes a ‘plan holiday’ instead |
| early 1960s to early 1970s | The proportion of savings in the country drops consistently |
| 23 June 2006 | The Hindu reports the demonstration against the POSCO plant |
| 1 January 2015 | NITI Aayog comes into existence |
1944 Bombay Plan · March 1950 Planning Commission ·
December 1951 First Plan Document · 1 January 2015 NITI Aayog. Say them in that
order once a day and you will never confuse the Plan’s period, 1951 to 1956, with the Plan document’s
release date, December 1951.
3 The Orissa Case in Six Lines
| Who | What they want or fear |
|---|---|
| The State government | To cash in on unprecedented global demand for iron ore; signs MoUs with international and domestic steel makers; expects capital investment and a lot of employment |
| The tribal population | The ore lies in the most underdeveloped and predominantly tribal districts; they fear displacement from home and livelihood |
| The environmentalists | That mining and industry would pollute the environment |
| The central government | That disallowing the industry would set a bad example and discourage investments in the country |
The report beside the chapter’s opening is from The Hindu, 23 June 2006, filed from
Bhubaneswar. People facing displacement by the proposed POSCO-India steel plant in
Jagatsinghpur district demonstrated outside the Korean company’s office, demanding
cancellation of the memorandum of understanding signed with the Orissa government a year earlier.
More than 100 men and women from the gram panchayats of Dhinkia, Nuagaon and
Gadakujanga tried to enter the office premises and were prevented by the police. The
demonstration was organised by the Rashtriya Yuva Sangathan and the Nabanirman
Samiti.
Captions and clippings are examined exactly like body text, and they are what most students skip.
The two names of the organising bodies and the three gram panchayats are the kind of detail a
1-mark question is built on.
These questions cannot be answered by an expert. They involve weighing one social group against
another, and the present generation against future generations. Advice should be taken from experts
on mining, from environmentalists and from economists, but the final decision must be a political
decision, taken by people’s representatives who are in touch with the feelings of the people.
That single sentence is the reason this chapter is in a politics book at all.
4 The Debate on Development, in One Table
| Agreed by everyone | Disagreed about | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Development means economic growth and social and economic justice |
How much importance to give justice if it differs from the requirements of growth |
| Who acts | It cannot be left to businessmen, industrialists and farmers; the government must play a key role |
What kind of role the government should play |
| Method | Development cannot be left to private actors; a design or plan is needed |
Whether a centralised institution should plan for the entire country, and whether the government should itself run key industries and business |
| Model | Free India’s economic concerns must differ from the colonial government’s narrowly defined commercial functions |
Liberal-capitalist as in Europe and the US, or socialist as in the USSR |
| Priority | Poverty alleviation and redistribution are primarily the government’s responsibility |
Industrialisation first, or agriculture and the alleviation of rural poverty first |
Development means different things to different people: to an industrialist planning a
steel plant, to an urban consumer of steel, and to the Adivasi who lives in that
region. The ‘West’ was taken as the standard for measuring it, so development meant becoming modern
and modern meant becoming like the industrialised countries of the West. That is where the
vocabulary of developed, developing and underdeveloped countries comes from. The chapter’s
margin asks the question it does not answer: do we have to be western in order to be modern?
5 Why Everyone Wanted Planning
- The experience of the Great Depression in Europe.
- The inter-war reconstruction of Japan and Germany.
- Most of all, the spectacular economic growth against heavy odds in the Soviet Union in
the 1930s and 1940s.
And the Indian reason that surprises everybody: the Bombay Plan of 1944. Private investors
are usually assumed to want an open economy with no state control over the flow of capital. Here a
section of the big industrialists asked the state to take major initiatives in investment. That is
why the chapter can say that from left to right, planning was the most obvious choice.
6 The Planning Commission and What Replaced It
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Set up how? | By a simple resolution of the Government of India, March 1950. Not a body created by the Constitution |
| What power? | An advisory role only; recommendations effective only when the Union Cabinet approved them |
| Who chaired it? | The Prime Minister |
| Why did it matter then? | It became the most influential and central machinery for deciding what path and strategy India would adopt for its development |
| Replaced by? | NITI Aayog, National Institution for Transforming India, 1 January 2015 |
The resolution defined the Commission’s work by pointing to the Fundamental Rights and the
Directive Principles of State Policy, and in particular to three things the State should
secure:
- that citizens, men and women equally, have the right to an adequate means of
livelihood; - that the ownership and control of the material resources of the community are so
distributed as best to subserve the common good; - that the operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth
and means of production to the common detriment.
The margin of that page asks whether the Planning Commission actually followed these objectives
in practice. The chapter leaves the question open, which is itself the answer worth writing.
7 First Plan versus Second Plan
| First Plan (1951 to 1956) | Second Plan (from 1956) | |
|---|---|---|
| Aim | Get the economy out of the cycle of poverty | Quick structural transformation, changes in all possible directions at once |
| Sector | The agrarian sector, dams and irrigation | Heavy industries |
| Person | K.N. Raj, who said India should ‘hasten slowly’ for the first two decades, as a fast rate of development might endanger democracy |
P. C. Mahalanobis, who led the drafting team |
| Project named | The Bhakhra Nangal Dam | Electricity, railways, steel, machineries and communication in the public sector |
| Diagnosis | The pattern of land distribution is the principal obstacle to agricultural growth; land reforms are the key |
Domestic industry needs protection; substantial tariffs on imports |
| Political backing | None named | The Congress at Avadi declares ‘socialist pattern of society’ to be its goal |
| Temper | Preached patience | Preached speed |
Raising national income needed higher savings. Spending was already so low in the
1950s that it could not be cut, and the total capital stock was low compared with the number
of employable people, so pushing savings up was hard. Savings did rise until the end of the
Third Plan, but less than expected, and then dropped consistently from the early 1960s
till the early 1970s.
8 What Went Wrong, and What the Critics Said
The problems the chapter names.
- India was technologically backward, so it had to spend precious foreign exchange
buying technology from the global market. - Industry attracted more investment than agriculture, so the possibility of food
shortage loomed large. - The planners found balancing industry and agriculture really difficult, and the
Third Plan was not significantly different from the Second.
The three criticisms.
- The plan strategies from this time displayed an unmistakable “urban bias”.
- Industry was wrongly given priority over agriculture.
- The focus should have been on agriculture-related industries rather than heavy
ones.
9 Boxes, Captions and Margins: the Marks Nobody Collects
| Where it is | What it says |
|---|---|
| The stamps caption | Stamps issued mostly between 1955 and 1968 depicted a vision of planned development: Damodar Valley, Bhakra Dam, Chittaranjan Locomotives, Gauhati Refinery, Tractor, Sindri Fertilisers, Bhakra Dam again, Electric Train, Wheat Revolution, Hirakud Dam, Hindustan Aircraft Factory |
| Left and Right box | The terms characterise a group’s position on social change and on the role of the state in effecting economic redistribution |
| Planning Commission box | Not a constitutional body; March 1950; a simple resolution; advisory; the Union Cabinet approves |
| Fast Forward box | NITI Aayog, National Institution for Transforming India, 1 January 2015; the box asks you to find its objectives and composition at niti.gov.in |
| Mahalanobis profile | 1893 to 1972; scientist and statistician of international repute; founder of the Indian Statistical Institute (1931); architect of the Second Plan; supporter of rapid industrialisation and an active role for the public sector |
| Photo captions | Orissa villagers protest against POSCO plant · Nehru addressing the staff of the Planning Commission · First Five Year Plan document · Tenth Five Year Plan document |
| The two margin questions | Do we have to be western in order to be modern? · Has the Planning Commission actually followed these objectives in practice? |
10 The Chapter in Twelve Lines
- Economic development was the third challenge after nation-building and democracy, and
the chapter says success on it was much more limited. - The Orissa case shows that development is contested, not technical.
- The final decision on such a question must be political, taken by people’s
representatives. - Everyone agreed on growth with justice and on a key role for government;
nobody agreed on what that role should be. - Left wants state control; Right wants free competition.
- The two models were liberal-capitalist and socialist; very few Indians supported
American style capitalism. - The Bombay Plan (1944) proves that even industrialists wanted planning.
- The Planning Commission (March 1950) was advisory, chaired by the Prime Minister, and
not a constitutional body. - The First Plan (1951 to 1956) was agrarian, cautious, and built on land reform;
K.N. Raj said hasten slowly because speed might endanger democracy. - The Second Plan (1956) was industrial and fast, drafted under Mahalanobis, backed
by the Avadi resolution and protected by tariffs. - It marked a turning point, but cost foreign exchange and risked food shortage, and drew
the charge of an “urban bias”. - With the Fourth Plan due in 1966 and a crisis on, the government took a ‘plan
holiday’. The Planning Commission was replaced by NITI Aayog on 1 January 2015.
11 CBSE 2026-27 Reference Material: NITI Aayog and the NDC
Status: the CBSE 2026-27 curriculum lists this as additional reference material. Its annexure says this material is “for classroom transaction and will not be assessed in the Board examination”. Read it for understanding; it is not part of the NCERT book.
- NITI Aayog: abolition of the Planning Commission announced in the PM’s Independence Day speech of 15 August 2014; NITI Aayog constituted on 1 January 2015.
- PM = ex-officio Chairman, appoints the Vice Chairperson; first VC Arvind Panagariya, current VC (per the curriculum) Suman Bery.
- A think tank of the Union Government; ‘Bottom-Up Approach’, cooperative federalism.
- NDC (Rashtriya Vikas Parishad): apex body on development matters, presided over by the PM; set up 6 August 1952 under Nehru to back the Five Year Plans.
- NDC members: PM, Union Cabinet Ministers, Chief Ministers of all states, UT representatives, members of NITI Aayog. Aim: states’ cooperation, mobilise resources, common economic policies, balanced and rapid development.