Planned Democracy: Citizenship, Development, and the Practices of Planning in Independent India, c. 1947-1966

Abstract

From 1950, the Planning Commission of India negotiated an unlikely marriage between

parliamentary democracy and centralized economic planning—precisely when the Cold War

pitted them as fundamentally incompatible. My research argues that India’s Five Year Plans

were more than a means of regulating an economy; planning was also an expansive project to

shape the nature of Indian democracy and society in the aftermath of colonialism. Planning was

simultaneously a technocratic exercise in directing the economy, a means of modern state

building, and an attempt at state-directed social transformation. This dissertation examines

India’s experience with economic planning through the frames of technology and social science

on the one hand, and the political projects of citizenship and nation building on the other.

Establishing a planned economy required certain technologies and social-scientific capacities.

India’s ‘democratic planning’ approach, however, also necessitated governmental efforts to draw

citizens into the planning project—educating them about it to build ‘plan-consciousness’, and

eliciting their support in implementation. Anchored in the subcontinent, my study situates India

within global post-war debates about development and maps transnational flows of ideas,

individuals, and institutions between India, the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union. It

situates South Asia within the Cold War, and links this experience with patterns of development

in the Global South.