India's Five-Year Plans were one of the developing world's most ambitious experiments. After nearly two centuries of colonial rule, planning the economy was meant to be independent India's route from poverty to prosperity. Planning Democracy explores how India married liberal democracy to a socialist economy. Planning not only built India's data systems, it even shaped the nature of its democracy. The Five-Year Plans loomed so large that they linked surprisingly far-flung contexts-from computers to Bollywood to Hindutva.
In this compelling history, Nikhil Menon brings the world of planning to life through the intriguing story of a gifted scientist known as the Professor, a trail-blazing research institute in Calcutta, and the alluring idea of 'democratic planning'. Set amidst global conflicts and international debates, Menon reveals how India walked a tightrope between capitalism and communism. Planning Democracy recasts our understanding of the Indian republic, uncovering how planning came to define the nation and revealing the ways in which it continues to shape our world today
Review
Planning Democracy is an important contribution to the growing literature on the history of India since Independence. The book elegantly blends biography and history, exploring how a group of politicians and scholars once made the idea of 'planning' central to the Indian republic. The author has skilfully mined a wide array of primary sources, and his pen portraits are particularly well done. -- Ramachandra Guha, author of India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy
This book will help rethink how planning for development took hold in India's democratic imagination. Its fresh research delves into two neglected aspects of the planning process in India in the fifties. The first is the creation of a world-class institutional base for statistics by the formidable figure of Mahalanobis. It also looks at ingenious attempts at enlisting everything from Sadhus to Bollywood in publicizing Five-Year Plans. It is a refreshing look at how the discourse of development was constituted. -- Pratap Bhanu Mehta, author of The Burden of Democracy
An engaging account of independent India's intertwined experiments with planning and democracy. If the setting up of India's data infrastructure forms the kernel of the early history of planning, the story of how popular culture was mobilized to propagate the plan illuminates the early tensions in building a secular democracy. -- Niraja Gopal Jayal, Centennial Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science
Written with wit and energy, impeccably well-researched, Planning Democracy makes a bold new contribution to our understanding of the Indian state after 1947. Menon's is the best history we have of India's great experiment with statistics-a data-driven attack on social and economic inequality that aimed, not always successfully, to be compatible with participatory democracy. Menon combines intellectual and institutional history to make a compelling case that we should focus less on whether planning "succeeded" or "failed", in any narrow sense, and more on the profound ways it shaped India's political imagination. This excellent book is sure to find a wide and appreciative audience across disciplines. -- Sunil Amrith, Dhawan Professor of History, Yale University
About the Author
Nikhil Menon is assistant professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. He grew up in Chennai and studied at Delhi University as well as Jawaharlal Nehru University. His PhD in history is from Princeton University. He lives in South Bend, Indiana.
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