to get the plans to work was based on the answer to the underlying
question: would existing vested interests militate against changing social
relations in the country? And if this was the case, would the best-laid
plans of economists and statisticians be insufficient to achieve significant
results?
It can be said that there was a continuous conflict between liberal
market urges and control urges, represented among policy-makers by
separate camps that tended to work against each other. During the First
Plan various voices spoke in favour of an ultimate goal of removing
controls over the price and movement of food-grains. An earlier attempt
to do this, in 1947, supported idiosyncratically by Gandhi at a time of
food shortages, had been a great disaster, leading to spiralling price rises,
and controls had had to be swiftly put back in place in 1948. But the
results of the First Plan had given cause for celebration; total production
of cereals for 1953–4 was three million tonnes higher than the target
fixed for 1955–6; consequently, the state abolished all controls on food-
grains. Also, despite the rhetoric of self-sufficiency a liberal import policy
had been followed, with the result that foreign exchange reserves were
used up fast – the sterling balances, for instance, were gone far sooner
than expected, by 1956. Nehru, although chairman of the Planning
Commission, was not in touch with its day-to-day duties; his best wishes
were with his planners, and he co-wrote some important policy state-
ments, but on the details he relied on the ‘experts’.
A degree of impatience with – and an over-reliance on results achieved
in – the First Plan could be observed among planners, in their desire to
get on with what they considered the main business of industrialisation.
By 1954, the Second Plan was already in preparation; the First had
only been approved by Parliament in late 1952. The First Plan had given
rise to a tendency to believe that the agricultural sector would continue
to provide for the rest: cheap food and cheap labour. ‘Institutional con-
straints’, as the euphemism put it, were of course acknowledged – the
Second Plan contained an important chapter that stressed the importance
of ‘land reforms and agrarian reorganisation’, pointing the way towards an
eventual cooperative system of farming. Politically, as everyone knew by
this time, this was always going to be difficult. But, as Mahalanobis put
it, ‘a plan has to be a drama’. This drama was to be the Second Plan.
Social justice, to some extent, was something for which the Nehruvians
believed they could plan. From 1955, the Congress had declared, and224 HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63