Gandhian Plan
Topic: Politics of Planned Development · NCERT: Beyond NCERT
Meaning
The Gandhian Plan was a development plan drafted in 1944 by Shriman Narayan Agarwal on Gandhian lines. It wanted a decentralised economy, meaning economic power spread out to villages instead of held at the centre. It put cottage industries (small industries run from homes) and agriculture before heavy industry. It was one of several pre-independence plans that show how widely Indians accepted the need to plan.
Example
The Bombay Plan of the same year (1944) wanted the state to lead big investment in industry. The Gandhian Plan took the opposite path, built around self-reliant villages and small-scale production.
Don't confuse with
- Sarvodaya Plan (1950): it was also Gandhian in spirit, but it came from Jayaprakash Narayan, not Shriman Narayan Agarwal.
- Bombay Plan (1944): it came from industrialists and wanted state-led industrial investment.