The Role of Economic Planning in fostering India's Socio-Economic Development

Since India’s Independence in 1947 it has made significant economic progress. On an average of the national income over the last decade shows that the real national income has increased at annual rate of about 3%. Productive capacity in the Indian economy has increased through increasing investment and the rate of economic performance has been grown effectively. There is little doubt that the Indian economy is moving away from dead centre and cannot be characterized as “stagnant,” a term which could have been applied to it with some justification during the earlier decades. It is, however, clear that this rate of growth is small relative to the rate of population increase, which has been estimated to be 1.5% per annum. The rate of increase of per capita income, therefore, comes to 1.5% per annum. If the rate of increase of population accelerates in the future, as some experts forecast on very good grounds, the present rate of increase of national income will be completely inadequate and India will have to grow faster even to keep it at the same level of per capita income. There is considerable evidence, both official and un-official, from Indian and foreign observers, to indicate that the development effort in India during the last decade has been characterized by much inefficiency and waste. The available economic resources have not been as productively used under the given conditions as they could have been and when one begins to consider and analyses this, he soon comes up with the fact that the causes lie deep in the whole Indian cultural and social setup and that it involves the whole problem of the social efficiency of the Indian society. To anticipate. This us first substantiate the opening gambit that the Indian development effort during the fifties which was inefficient. Perhaps we can begin by the observations of the latest Indian delegation to China, which visited that country early in 1959 to study the Chinese achievements in the conservation and maximum utilization of water, including rain water. What the delegation found most impressive, which was the type of organisation employed for achieving the remarkable results in this field rather than the use of any new techniques which were being used in China and which were not known or used in India.