ABSTRACT
Both India and China began planning for national development in the early 1950s following Indian independence in 1947 and Chinese independence in 1949. China largely had a command economy structure until the late 1970s and although India adopted a mixed economy, state regulation of economic activity was fairly extensive until 1991. In the 1950s, both India and China were at similar stages of development. The World Bank noted that both states had similar per capita incomes in the range of $50-60 (World Bank, 1983). Both states also adopted similar strategies for economic development (Chen and Uppal, 1971; Swamy, 2003). Mao and Nehru had been influenced by the perceived success of the Soviet Union’s rapid industrialization of a rural economy with little external assistance (Nehru had visited the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and was impressed by Soviet planning; Nehru, 1946). The development strategy of the Soviet Union was in many ways emulated by both India and China as they focused on investment in heavy industry in the 1950s.
