Under Nehru, there had been no attempt to introduce publicly financed social policies for the rural poor. Instead, social policy focused on activating a ‘duty to work’, while the absence of a model of labour-intensive industrialisation ensured there was no mass movement from rural areas into urban employment. The green revolution in the mid 1960s initiated a new form of agrarian capitalism but also drove rising inequality and endemic unemployment. This created pressure for new social policies to address rural poverty and support rural consumption. The erosion of patron-client relations in rural areas intensified competition for the votes of the rural poor as the Congress Party’s dominant position came under serious pressure for the first time. It was the emergence of stronger multi-level, or Centre-State, electoral competition that provided the political impetus to expand social policy into rural areas as political parties competed for the votes of the rural poor, without alienating agrarian producers. The chapter explains why employment on rural public works became the dominant approach to social security in this context.

The Introduction lays out the argument of the book and the political stakes of economic planning for the Indian state. It illuminates how crucial planning was to the Nehruvian state’s self-definition, and how the experiment of Plans and Parliament was meant to represent a distinct path in the superpower-divided Cold War. Seen from western capitals, the Indian experiment offered a path for Asia that was in stark contrast to the communist totalitarianism of the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. It opens with a brief, but broad, history of the ideas of economic planning and national development in India between the late nineteenth century and the establishment of the Planning Commission in 1950. Surveying the spread of these ideas, it reveals the surprising support planning had across the political spectrum. There is also a short description of the international context of central planning and state intervention in the economy (ranging from the Soviet Union, to post-war Britain and New Deal America) in order to situate the Indian path within it. Along with an engagement with the secondary literature on the subject, the introduction lays out the key themes that the rest of the book will pursue.