ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the Indian economic scene at independence, which helped provide a context within which India's approach to economic development was formulated. It focuses on the maturation of the approach. The chapter explores how planning paradigms and models evolved over time. The performance of the Indian economy until 1990 is then reviewed, followed by a discussion of what went wrong. It also focuses on the economic scene at independence. Long before independence, Indian nationalists had started thinking about the objectives and strategy of economic development that independent India should pursue. Entry of foreign capital was resisted by Indian nationalists. The First Five-Year Plan did not have a formal planning model but, instead, stressed investment for capital accumulation in the spirit of one-sector Harrod-Domar model. Consequently, the Second Five-Year Plan was based on a theoretical model developed by P. C. Mahalanobis, a member of the National Planning Committee and a noted statistician who had founded the Indian Statistical Institute.
