Nirupam Haldar in his letter to the editor, "Downfall of the CPI" (April 6), says, "In the early 1950s, P C Mahalanobis, a Cambridge-educated statistician, drafted the first Five-Year Plan in consultation with Stalin's advisers." This is untrue. The First Five-Year Plan (1951-56) was mainly a compilation of several existing investment programmes, including some suggested in the previous decade by a group of Indian industrialists (now known as the Bombay Plan). Its main theoretical underpinning was provided by K N Raj, then with the Planning Commission. He was basically a Keynesian left-leaning liberal but miles away from any Stalinist inclination.
Mahalanobis joined the Planning Commission in 1955 and was instrumental in formulating the Second Plan (1956-61). This Plan - and the subsequent ones as well - showed the great influence of the Leontief Input-Output Model. Leontief, though of Russian origin, was imprisoned during the Stalin regime. He produced his seminal work at Harvard University.
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The Soviet planning model was in vogue in the 1950s, but without its Stalinist overtones. Several foreign scholars were associated with early planning exercises in India, notably Nicholas Kaldor, Ragnar Nurske, P N Rosenstein-Rodan, Gunnar Myrdal and even Milton Friedman. None of them could be called remotely Stalinist.
In the process of demonising the Communist movement, we must not tar our own planning process, despite its many weaknesses and failures, with the same brush.
Shreekant Sambrani, Baroda
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