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.

Chapter 4 charts the Indian government’s ambition to make planning ‘democratic’ by convincing its citizenry of the need for planning and securing their participation. The government sought to spur grassroots enthusiasm by planting it—a campaign that was self-undermining by its very nature. It examines why public participation in planning mattered to the Indian government and uncovers the many channels through which the state sought to spread the gospel of planning. The means employed by government to instil “Plan-consciousness” included publicity teams on bullock carts and boats, a Khushwant Singh-edited Plan magazine named Yojana, plays by leading Hindi playwrights like Ramesh Mehta, musical and drama troupes, and state propaganda films screened for mass audiences through the Films Division. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how this Plan-consciousness even seeped into commercial Hindi cinema, or Bollywood.

If democratic planning was to become a mass movement, as the government hoped, it would require the voluntary participation of Indian citizens. Chapter 5 examines how, in the absence of spontaneous participation, the state supported voluntary organizations to spread the message of the Five Year Plans and offer services toward their fulfilment. It analyses the paradox of the state intervening to stimulate voluntary support for its policies. The chapter traces efforts to involve youths through College and University Planning Forums, and other social groups through the Bharat Sewak Samaj (Service to India Society). It also analyses a curious experiment—the enigmatic Bharat Sadhu Samaj (Indian Society of Ascetics). A brainchild of Gulzarilal Nanda, the devout Minister for Planning, its goal was to publicize the Plans using Hinduism as a resource. The attempt reveals how the Nehruvian state propagated Five Year Plans—the very symbol of secular technocracy and scientific modernity—using saffron-robed Hindu monks and ascetics. The startling long-term fallout of this project was the Sadhu Samaj’s drift towards Hindu nationalism. Ultimately, this religious venture underlines the awkward relationship and largely failed wedding of technocratic and democratic dimensions of planning.

The Introduction lays out the argument of the book and the political stakes of economic planning for the Indian state. It illuminates how crucial planning was to the Nehruvian state’s self-definition, and how the experiment of Plans and Parliament was meant to represent a distinct path in the superpower-divided Cold War. Seen from western capitals, the Indian experiment offered a path for Asia that was in stark contrast to the communist totalitarianism of the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. It opens with a brief, but broad, history of the ideas of economic planning and national development in India between the late nineteenth century and the establishment of the Planning Commission in 1950. Surveying the spread of these ideas, it reveals the surprising support planning had across the political spectrum. There is also a short description of the international context of central planning and state intervention in the economy (ranging from the Soviet Union, to post-war Britain and New Deal America) in order to situate the Indian path within it. Along with an engagement with the secondary literature on the subject, the introduction lays out the key themes that the rest of the book will pursue.

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.