Poverty and Paradigm-Shift:A Retrospect

This is a look at the approach to the First Five Year Plan in retrospect. What is at stake for most of the developing countries today is not some marginal adjustment in resource allocation but radical modification in their economic structures and policies, political arrangements and attitudes to social change. As a staff member of the Planning Commission in its initial years, it seems to me that recalling the conditions and urges, which gave shape to the basic approach to planning then, may be of some relevance to the current debate. In what follows, I shall try in the first instance to set out the conditions and compulsions under which the basic approach to planning was formulated in the early 1950s. I shall then summarise briefly the theoretical support for that approach and finally touch upon some matters of current policy.