The First Five Year Plan (1951-56): agriculture first and 'hasten slowly'

Detail

1. Aim and timing

• First Five Year Plan (FYP): India's first official five-year development plan. It ran from 1951 to 1956. The Planning Commission (set up in 1950) drafted it.
• Main aim: to pull the economy out of the cycle of poverty.

• Cycle of poverty: people are poor, so they save little. Low savings mean low investment. Low investment keeps income low, so people stay poor.

• Stated priorities: agriculture, price stability, power and transport [2].

• Price stability means keeping prices from rising fast.

2. K.N. Raj and 'hasten slowly'

• K.N. Raj was a young economist who helped draft the plan.
• 'Hasten slowly': India should develop slowly for the first two decades.
• His reason: very fast development could endanger democracy.
• Fast growth needs heavy taxes, forced savings and sudden social change.

• That could cause unrest, or push the state towards coercion.

• Contrast for exams: the Second Plan (1956-61) dropped this caution. It pushed fast heavy industrialisation (the Mahalanobis model).

3. Agriculture first: why?

• Partition (1947) hit the farm sector hardest.
• Canal-irrigated West Punjab went to Pakistan, and so did its fertile wheat land.
• Jute-growing East Bengal went to Pakistan, but the jute mills stayed in India.

• Result: India ran short of food and had to import food grains.

• Big money for dams and irrigation:

• Bhakra Nangal Dam (Sutlej river; Punjab–Himachal) got a huge allocation.
• Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC), 1948: a multipurpose river valley body on the TVA model (TVA was the Tennessee Valley Authority in the USA). It covers Bihar/Jharkhand and West Bengal.
• Hirakud Dam on the Mahanadi in Odisha.

• Multipurpose project: a single dam that serves irrigation, power, flood control and drinking water.

• Land distribution as the main obstacle:

• The plan said unequal land distribution (a few landlords owning most of the land) was the biggest barrier to farm growth.
• So it made land reform the key to development.
• Land reform means changing who owns or controls land: abolishing zamindari, protecting tenants and putting ceilings on how much land one person can hold (details → land-reforms-green-revolution).

4. The savings problem

• Basic logic: national income can rise only if people save more than they spend. Those savings become investment.
• Two difficulties in the 1950s:
• Consumption (spending) was already very low. Poor people could not cut it further to save more.

• Capital stock was small compared with the number of people who could work. There were few machines, tools and factories for a large workforce.

• What actually happened:

• Savings rose until the end of the Third Plan (1961-66), but less than expected.

• Savings then fell steadily from the early 1960s to the early 1970s.

• Harrod-Domar-type model: a growth model that says growth = savings rate ÷ capital-output ratio. The capital-output ratio is how much capital you need to produce one extra unit of output. So more saving and investment gives faster growth. The First Plan was built broadly on this logic.

• Performance:
• Target growth: 2.1% a year.
• Actual growth: 3.6% a year.
• The plan beat its modest target [2] (more growth data → planning-mixed-economy).

5. Programmes of the First Plan period

Programme / body	Year	What it did
Community Development Programme (CDP)	2 October 1952	Block-level rural development covering farming, health, education and roads, with people's participation
National Extension Service (NES)	1953	Extension workers carried farm techniques and welfare schemes to villages
Balwant Rai Mehta Committee	1957	Reviewed CDP and NES [3] and recommended democratic decentralisation, which led to three-tier panchayati raj (→ panchayati-raj)

• Why the review mattered: CDP was run by officials and drew little real participation from people. This weakness led to the demand for elected local bodies [3].

6. Legal shield for zamindari abolition: the First Amendment, 1951

• Problem: states passed zamindari abolition laws. Landlords challenged them in court under the right to property. Long court cases held up agrarian reform [4][6].

• Zamindari: a system in which intermediaries (zamindars) collected land revenue from farmers and kept a share.

• Steps:

• The Constitution (First Amendment) Bill was introduced on 12 May 1951 [4].

• Constitution (First Amendment) Act, 1951 inserted Article 31A, Article 31B and the Ninth Schedule [4].

• What each part does:

Provision	Effect
Article 31A	A law to acquire an "estate", or to end or change rights in it, cannot be declared void for violating Fundamental Rights [6]
Article 31B	Acts placed in the Ninth Schedule cannot be declared void for violating any Fundamental Right [7]
Ninth Schedule	A list of protected laws. Early entries included the UP Zamindari Abolition and Land Reforms Act, 1950 and the Madras Estates (Abolition and Conversion into Ryotwari) Amendment Act, 1950 [5]

• Later developments (Kesavananda Bharati 1973; I.R. Coelho 2007, which allows review of Ninth Schedule laws added after 24 April 1973) → amendment-basic-structure.

7. The politics behind 'agriculture first'

• Why the farm focus suited the Congress:
• Much of the Congress's rural leadership came from landed groups.

• Spending on irrigation, dams and farm inputs helped them directly.

• Why land reform stalled:

• The same landed leaders controlled state governments and local party units. Land reform was a state subject.
• So zamindari abolition largely went ahead, because it hit absentee intermediaries.

• But land ceilings and tenancy reforms were weakly enforced, because they hit the leaders' own holdings.

• Francine Frankel's argument: the Congress tried to bring about radical change through accommodative politics, without class conflict. This built-in contradiction blunted redistribution (§6 of parent note).

Prelims Hooks

• Duration of the First Five Year Plan → 1951-56. Main focus → agriculture, including irrigation and dams.
• 'Hasten slowly' → K.N. Raj: go slow for two decades, or democracy could be endangered.
• First Plan growth: target 2.1%, achieved 3.6% [2]. It is the plan that beat its target.
• Underlying model of the First Plan → Harrod-Domar. Second Plan → Mahalanobis. This is a common trap.
• Community Development Programme → launched 2 October 1952. National Extension Service → 1953. Both reviewed by Balwant Rai Mehta (1957) [3].
• First Amendment, 1951 → inserted Arts. 31A, 31B and the Ninth Schedule [4].
• Article 31B protects laws listed in the Ninth Schedule. Article 31A protects laws for the acquisition of estates [6][7].
• Match: Bhakra Nangal – Sutlej; Hirakud – Mahanadi; DVC (1948) – Damodar, on the TVA model.
• The First Plan named unequal land distribution, not a shortage of technology, as the main obstacle to farm growth.

Mains Points

• Democracy vs speed of development: K.N. Raj's 'hasten slowly' shows an early choice. India accepted slower growth to protect consent-based democratic politics, unlike forced-pace models such as the Soviet Union's. This is useful for "planning in a democracy" answers (GS-I/GS-II).
• Agriculture first was a response to Partition: losing West Punjab's canal land and East Bengal's jute made food security urgent. The First Plan's success (3.6% growth against a 2.1% target [2]) gave confidence for the Second Plan's industrial shift.
• Land reform and constitutional amendment: the First Amendment (1951) [4] shows Parliament using constitutional change to push social reform past court challenges. It started the long tension between property rights and judicial review that ended in the basic structure doctrine.
• Political economy limits: the Congress depended on landed rural elites. This explains why irrigation spending succeeded while land ceilings and tenancy reform stalled (Frankel). It shows how the social base of a ruling party shapes policy outcomes.