Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the politics of planning in late twentieth-century India. It closes with methodological reflections on the ways in which my research questions and methods in post-colonial histories of science and technology have been altered by an engagement with histories of planning.

Paper long abstract:

India's first Five Year Plan went public on December 7th, 1952, by which time, as one commentator noted, 'the plan which it purported to describe had been in operation for some twenty months.' India's planners, educated in the latest theories of development planning, envisioned rapid economic advance as 'conditional upon additions to and improvements in the technological framework implicit in a high rate of capital formation.' Technological assumptions shaped a 'master narrative' of Indian planning. But planning's messiness on the ground was noted by both planners and the people they targeted. There had even been calls for inter-disciplinarity in planning, and criticism of the state's technocratic illusions. In October 1952, 'Samaja Shastrajna,' writing to The Economic Weekly, had complained,: 'When will economists and the Government realize that economic reforms need to take into account the social constitutions within which economic factors operate? Only in India could the Government launch on a five year plan without consulting a single sociologist who has a first-hand acquaintance with the social institutions of the people.' A half-century later, despite calls for interdisciplinarity, planning analyses tend to cluster in familiar paradigms and departments, and to re-circulate abstract binaries between master plans and ungovernable subjects, technological knowledge and ground-level realities. This paper explores the politics of planning in late twentieth-century India. It closes with methodological reflections on the ways in which my research questions and methods in post-colonial histories of science and technology have been fundamentally altered by an engagement with histories of planning.