Planning Democracy: How a Professor, an Institute, and an Idea Shaped India

This conversation will revolve around the themes of Nikhil Menon’s recent book—Planning Democracy: How a Professor, an Institute, and an Idea Shaped India (Penguin, 2022). The book explores how planning became so central to the story of modern India. It is about one of the great experiments of the twentieth century. After nearly two centuries of colonial rule, economic planning was meant to be independent India’s route to prosperity. India combined Soviet-inspired, socialist Five Year Plans and western liberal democracy at a time when the Cold War pitted those ideas against each other. The book looks beyond the debates about when and why the Plans failed to instead explain how planning captured the imagination of both India’s elite and its public. Planning not only built India’s data infrastructure—working through figures like P.C. Mahalanobis and institutions like the Indian Statistical Institute. It also became a mode of nation-building and the language through which Indian democracy was defined on the global stage. This discussion of Planning Democracy will explore the ways in which the legacy of India’s experiments with planning continues to shape India and the world today.

Speakers

Professor Nikhil Menon
Department of History
University of Notre Dame, USA 

Professor Atanu Biswas
Applied Statistics Unit
Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata

Professor Aparajith Ramnath
School of Arts and Sciences
Ahmedabad University 

Convened by

Professor Kaushik Jana
School of Arts and Sciences
Ahmedabad University 

Date: September 28, Wednesday
Time: 5:00 – 6:00 PM