State-led planning shaped the path of industrialisation in ways that prevented the expansion of a mass industrial workforce covered by social insurance. This chapter examines how - in conditions of labour abundance but capital scarcity – India’s planners sought to expand the capital-intensive, low-employment capital goods sectors of the economy as the key to unleashing the resources that would in the future be used for investment in the welfare state. In the interim, the majority of Indians would partake in a different form of ‘welfare state’ fulfilling a duty to work via small scale industry and involvement in community works in rural areas. This was a vision of decommodification that privileged the human need for self-creation through work, rather than protection of a minimum level of consumption. The chapter shows that the Nehru-Mahalanobis model overshadowed alternative visions for an Indian welfare state forwarded by sections of Indian business, in which the state would support the growth of mass-employing private consumer goods industries and focus its efforts on investing in human capital and infrastructure.

The burst of information generated by new statistical projects made the question of calculation paramount. The masses of data that the new National Sample Surveys yielded, and the increasing complexity of planning models, had made the state’s data processing needs evident. Chapter 3 reveals the campaign led by Mahalanobis and the Indian Statistical Institute to bring India its first computers. Unlike in other parts of the world, computers were not sought for military purposes in India. Instead, India pursued them because they were seen as a solution to central planning’s most knotty puzzle, that of big data. The chapter follows the decade-long quest to import computers from the United States, Europe, and the U.S.S.R, unearthing the Cold War politics in which it inevitably became embroiled. Overall, Part I of this book demonstrates the building of a technocratic, data-hungry, high-modernist state and its attempts to make the economic realm more legible.

The Epilogue traces the factors that caused a steady diminishment in the role and influence of the Planning Commission from the mid-1960’s onward—a combination of economic setbacks and changes in key players. After briefly tracing the fortunes of planning through the following decades, until its ultimate dissolution in 2015, it will conclude with a discussion of how the Rahul Gandhi—leader of the Congress Party, and Nehru’s great grandson—revived the specter of the Planning Commission on the 2019 general election campaign trail in order to contrast himself with Modi. It also discusses the current controversy over India’s statistical system, and why observers describe it as dismantling “the house that Mahalanobis built.” Planning Democracy concludes by underlining the key themes that emerged in the preceding chapters and underscore why understanding independent India is impossible without understanding planning.

Chapter 1 reveals how India’s statistical infrastructure was built and establishes its link to planning. It tracks the early career of P. C. Mahalanobis and the institution he founded in Calcutta (the Indian Statistical Institute) to describe the ascent of statistics as an academic discipline in India, and its growing association with applied economics. This was the period that produced organizations such as the Central Statistical Organization and the National Sample Survey, both of which persist and remain significant to policy making to this day. It was also during this phase that India first began periodic assessments of national income (a precursor to the GDP) and nationwide sample surveys that delivered high-definition snapshots of the economy. The chapter argues that this national statistical framework—pioneering among developing nations and a global trailblazer in large sample surveys—emerged as a response to the quantitative needs of centralized economic planning.

Chapter 2 lays out how the planning-induced expansion in the state’s capacities led to the formalization of planning’s relationship with statistics. Changes at both the Planning Commission and the Indian Statistical Institute bear witness to this. It placed a statistician and a statistical institute in a position where they could, in turn, shape Plans. The chapter traces a boomerang’s arc: planning’s influence on statistics led to statistics’ influence on planning. It explains how the Indian Statistical Institute completed the transition from a small scholarly body in the outskirts of Calcutta and on the fringes of mainstream academia in the 1930s, to a nodal agency in Indian economic planning by the mid-1950s. And it describes the way in which Mahalanobis used the close proximity of national statistics and economic planning at this moment to carve a position for himself at the Planning Commission. This culminated in him and the Institute drafting India’s pivotal Second Five Year Plan (1956–61), the economic blueprint for decades thereafter. The very possibility that a statistician could transform into an economic planner reveals the wide latitude granted to experts and expertise in a technocratic state.