Why Nehruvian planning failed in the long term

Early Indian liberal nationalists such as Dadabhai Naoroji, Romesh Chunder Dutt and Kashinath Trimbak Telang used the power of numbers to undermine the legitimacy of British rule in the second half of the 19th century. Nikhil Menon, a historian at the University of Notre Dame, US, has written an engaging book, Planning Democracy: How A Professor, An Institute, And An Idea Shaped India, with welcome flashes of wit, on what can similarly be described as statistical nationalism. He reached out to some of the best economists in the world and was happy when they agreed with him, though as Menon writes: “The irony … was that the world’s foremost expert on sample design wasn’t perturbed by the possibility of this sample being contaminated by selection bias.” In other words, Mahalanobis met foreign economists who were already excited by the possibilities of Indian planning. To be fair, the planning unit of the Indian Statistical Institute housed in Delhi nurtured a set of brilliant young economists, such as T.N. If the Planning Commission undercut the power of the finance ministry, then it in turn found its territory restricted by the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, outside the apparatus of the Indian state, and under the control of Mahalanobis, who became a formal member of the Planning Commission only in 1960.