Nikhil Menon’s ‘Planning Democracy’ brings the spotlight on PC Mahalanobis, father of big data in India

Sandeep Dikshit

There was a time in India’s post-Independence economic history when Calcutta conquered Delhi. PC Mahalanobis, the professor from Calcutta’s Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), saw early the potential of big data — seven decades before the term became fashionable — in planning for India’s economic growth that would take it from poverty to prosperity.

Jawaharlal Nehru recognised the tension between economic and political freedoms and backed the believers of big data because he felt the contradictions could be eased through planning. It was a tightrope walk between capitalism and communism as Mahalanobis was encouraged to frame a model of the synthesised Soviet-inspired economic planning and Western-style liberal democracy.

Mahalanobis, like Bhabha, was an institution builder. He dragged the ISI into limelight by making it a stopover for eminent foreign economists and statisticians from the West and thus trying to dispel the impression that the closeness with the Soviet Union had spurred the Five Year Plans. This is also the story of a persistent professor. He chased the chimera of importing an American computer for nearly a decade. Washington stonewalled his requests because it felt Mahalanobis was a communist with strong sympathies with USSR. The same story is getting repeated in 2022. India batting for its national interests is seen by Washington as consorting with their enemy.

Planning moved from politics to facts. The reliance on statistics would appease diverse claimants for the Central development pie that there was fair and criteria-based approach for its disbursement. He spent hours in fascinating exchanges where he convinced the powers-that-be that national statistics is required for national development. Up arose the Planning Commission, the Central Statistical Organisation, the National Sample Survey and the Indian Statistical Service cadre.

As was the case in the first flush of Independence, his paths entwined with those of the other greats who put together the building blocks of a strategically autonomous India. In case of computers, it was Homi Jahangir Bhabha.

More such greats flit in. Subhas Chandra Bose, then Congress president, was the one who introduced Mahalanobis to Nehru. Twenty years earlier, in 1917, Tagore introduced Mahalanobis to the scholar and educator Brajendranath Seal. Among those who admired his foresight and wisdom were economists VKRV Rao, KN Raj, Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati. But there were many who chafed against the almost-ideological devotion to planning and complained of having been marginalised. These included names like BR Shenoy, CN Vakil and Minoo Masani.

JB Kripalani and C Rajagopalachari were among the political critics. But Nehru ensured the Second Plan (1957-61) went through, setting the stage for the steel and power plants, dams and diesel engines. The Planning Commission magazine Yojana, the Films Division and even the Bharat Sadhu Samaj were used to politically legitimise planning, which in turn led to infusion of democratic empathy in the process. Persuaded by Gulzarilal Nanda, Nehru reluctantly addressed sadhus on the merits of planning. Politics, intrigue and rivalry form several sub-stories that avoid dryness in the main narrative of ‘Planning Democracy’ by Nikhil Menon.

But while Bollywood films (Naya Daur and Hum Hindustani) and even Kumbh Mela were pressed into the cause of planning, a top-down approach meant that “ordinary citizens could not participate in plan designs…” The fall of the Berlin Wall ended the era of planning, but Mahalanobis ensured a robust statistical infrastructure. It’s a book to savour.