Question -
Answer -
The strategy of development followed in the early years of the Second Five Year Plan raised several important questions. The following were the main arguments in the debate that ensued between industrialisation and agricultural development:
- Second Five Year Plan emphasised on industry in place of agriculture and rural India.
- Gandhian economists like J. C. Kumarappa proposed an alternative blueprint to emphasis on rural industrialisation.
- Chaudhary Charan Singh, a Congress leader who later broke from the party to form Bharatiya Lok Dal, also commented that the planning was leading to the creation of prosperity in urban and industrial section at the expense of the farmers and rural population.
Others thought that without a drastic increase in industrial production, there could be no escape from the cycle of poverty.
- They argued that Indian planning did have an agrarian strategy to boost the production of food- grains.
- It also proposed programmes of community development and spent large sums on irrigation projects and failure was not that of policy but its non-implementation, because the landowning classes had lot of social and political power.
- Besides, they also argue that even if the government had spent more money on agriculture it would not have solved the massive problem of rural poverty.