What is the Five-Year Plan?
- In the year 1928, Joseph Stalin, a Soviet political leader, and a Georgian Revolutionary introduced the first five-year plan in the Soviet Union that focused on developing heavy industry and agriculture.
- A five-year plan is an integrated and centralized national economic program. On 9th July 1951, the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, presented to the Indian Parliament the first five-year plan. The government of India adopted this planning model to assist them in effectively utilizing resources in a balanced manner.
- The first five-year plan targeted the GDP at 2.1% for the year, but India was already on a roll and recorded a growth of 3.6% that year.
- The second five-year plan targeted the Industrial growth of the country and was implemented in the period from April 1956 to March 1961. This plan was also known as the Mahalanobis Plan as it was the brainchild of Statistician Prashant Chandra Mahalanobis.
- The Planning Commission, from 1951 to 2014, developed, executed, and monitored the five-year plan of India. In 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the five-year plan system to rest.
Mahalanobis Plan
India, in 1947, adopted the mixed economy system and followed the philosophy of planned development. This gave rise to the first five-year plan for India in 1951. After the success of the first five-year plan, the second five-year plan was introduced — the Mahalanobis plan. Statistician Prashant Chandra Mahalanobis was the key person to develop the Mahalanobis plan and allocate resources in the productivity and investment sector to optimize these sectors in the long run.
G.A. Feldman 1928 was the economist in the Soviet era and was the man responsible for the idea behind the Mahalanobis Plan, from which Indian Statistician Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis took inspiration. The Neo Marxist model was the initial idea developed by Feldman in 1928.