Parliament had accepted, a commitment to a ‘socialistic pattern of society’.
The 1956 Industrial Policy Resolution replaced the gentler-on-private-
entrepreneurs Industrial Policy Resolution of 1948 – it envisaged the
dominance of the public sector, and a complementary private sector
preferably organised on cooperative lines. Rapid economic growth through
industrialisation, especially through the development of heavy industries
- machines to make machines (to make machines) – was set as the goal.
The Second Plan was to operate on the basis of these principles.
More ink has probably been spilt in praise or discussion of the Second
Plan than on Mr W.H. of Shakespeare’s sonnets, so perfect was it seen to
be by its supporters. Nehru co-wrote the introduction with Mahalanobis;
it is a tight, tense piece of writing that expresses the excitement of the
project. The total outlay envisaged was to be distributed across four
sectors: investment goods or capital goods; industrial goods; agricultural
and cottage industries; and services, education, health, ‘etc’ – the ‘etc’ was
an indicator of the lack of attention to the items before it in the planners’
imagination, despite their frequent resort to the language of welfare.
One-third of total investment was to be made on investment goods. The
rest was to be divided between industrial goods; agricultural and cottage
industries; and services, education, health, etc. Given the philosophy
of ‘jam tomorrow’ that the investment-goods-first strategy required, a
shortage of consumer goods was envisaged. Cottage industries, which
required low capital investment and were highly labour intensive, were to
make up for this shortage as well as provide extra employment. Raising
employment would itself create higher demand for consumer goods, to
be met by pursuing lightly capitalised methods of production – that is,
cottage industries. Following from the inauguration of the revamped
‘village community’ of the ‘community development’ programmes, it
was possible to invoke Gandhi as the spiritual patron of this strategy,
thereby implying, in a system that was intended to be consensual, that
both the ‘modernising’ industrialising agenda and the ‘Gandhian’ tradi-
tion of the Indian national movement were represented in the Second
Plan. Gandhi, of course, had based his rural idyll in large measure on
individuals’ voluntary limitation of their wants, a self-sufficient village
community, and harmony between man and nature – hardly what the
planners envisaged, given that their village was intended to support and
supplement their urban industrial landscapes; limitation of wants to most
people was a ridiculous idyll to promote given that they were already
HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63 225