As the Government, establishment media and parliamentary parties celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the country's so-called independence, it is an appropriate moment to survey the record of the Indian State. Fifty years ago, the Indian rulers made great claims that their Five-Year Plans were 'socialistic'. Yet these Plans have been a miserable failure at ensuring People's minimum welfare, let alone bring about 'socialism'.
Today, ironically, the Indian State and foreign financial institutions are trying to attribute this failure to 'socialistic planning' and rigid controls. In fact, the development planning of the Indian State has never borne any resemblance to socialistic planning. As S.K. Ghosh points out in the following essay, it was the British rulers themselves who initiated the exercise of 'planning' in India, to further their own interests. They were joined in this exercise by the top sections of Indian big business. In actual operation, the Five-Year Plans have merely served such interests. Despite a seeming array of regulatory mechanisms, the Plans, far from exercising rigid control over the economy, have been a plaything in the hands of the business tycoons and the rural elite. The Plans have also been an instrument to raise revenues from the working people and deploy them in the service of the ruling classes.
Now, as the industrialised world turns the screws and wishes to re-mould the Indian economy further to its requirements, the pretence of planning is being dropped, and the regulatory mechanisms are being scrapped. It is all the more relevant to that we look at what planning really ought to mean. The following essay also touches on this latter aspect. Its intention, then, is not merely to expose the now nearly defunct exercise of India's Plans, but to highlight the fundamental changes in the social order required for planning to be meaningful.
One chapter of this essay was published in Aspects no.18, January-March 1996, under the title: "Imperialist Agencies and India's Plans". To complete the picture, therefore, readers are requested to refer to that issue as well.
'— Editor, Aspects