This chapter considers the wartime controls and the crucial transition years from 1945 to 1952 in some detail. It evaluates the severe dislocations of economic activity and the intense fluctuations in policy that they caused. The central problem was severe inflation, caused by the financing of military expenditure during the Second World War. In theory the cost of the war was to be met by taxation in India and reimbursement from Britain. Land reform was endorsed by the First Five Year Plan in 1952, but within central government there was more concern with other issues. The rise in food prices, and the crisis of 1965-57, pushed the Indian government down a new path to agricultural development, a path that became a highway with the coming of the 'green revolution' in Indian agriculture. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, a particular type of economy emerged in India in which official planning and government economic management played a crucial part.