COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

Summary

Published by the Forum of Free Enterprise as a booklet dated 8 March 1961 and based on a speech delivered under the Forum’s auspices in Bombay on 15 September 1960, this essay by B. G. Rao, ICS (Retd.) is a systematic indictment of nine years of planned community development in India. Rao opens by insisting that his purpose is not to deny all progress but to name failure honestly: the Programme Evaluation Organisation’s Seventh Report (April 1960) found that the effort was ‘inadequately co-ordinated, governmental rather than popular in character, and sustained more by hope than by achievement.’ The A.I.C.C.’s own Economic Review raised a series of uncomfortable questions that the draft Third Five-Year Plan then conspicuously refused to answer—a silence Rao treats as evidence that the Planning Commission preferred parliamentary rubber-stamping to inconvenient self-scrutiny.

The heart of Rao’s critique is the absence of priorities. Both the First and Second Plans listed agriculture, co-operatives, land reform, small industries, rural electrification, social services and welfare all in one breath, with no ordering of precedence. The result, documented by a 1957 Committee on Plan Projects team, was that welfare activities—radio sets, community halls, tiled school roofs—crowded out economic development. A UN Technical Assistance mission found a development block where village streets had been paved with bricks while the urgent need was to drain excess water from cotton fields. Rao’s prescription is blunt: the only first priority must be the increase in agricultural production; the only thing that may rank above it is the supply of drinking water. Everything else—social education, women’s programmes, literacy classes—must follow, not precede, the farmer’s acquisition of genuine economic strength.

Rao extends this critique in three specific directions. On co-operatives, he argues that the ‘one village, one co-operative’ slogan, championed by two influential Planning Commission members against the unanimous evidence of the Reserve Bank’s Rural Credit Survey, multiple expert teams and all State Governments, produces units too small to be viable; the draft Third Plan’s maximum population coverage of 1,000 per co-operative is indefensible. On rural unemployment and cottage industries, he notes that the Programme Evaluation Organisation found 63 per cent wastage among trainees in pilot projects, while the draft plan offers only platitudes with no quantitative estimate of the scale of unemployment to be solved. On organisation, he argues that the existence of a separate Ministry of Community Development—duplicating Agriculture, Health, Education and Culture with its own expert staff, annual hill-station conferences and the Community Development Institute at Mussoorie—is an avoidable waste; the 1956 decision to integrate overlapping Central Social Welfare Board and Community Development activities had, four years later, been reduced to a pilot of twenty blocks. Rao closes by observing that the villager remains patient, but that people in positions of power have taken too little interest in examining what is actually being done in his name.

Key points

• The Programme Evaluation Organisation’s Seventh Report (1960) found the community development programme ‘inadequately co-ordinated, governmental rather than popular, and sustained more by hope than by achievement’—a conclusion the draft Third Plan deliberately ignored.

• Neither the First nor the Second Plan prescribed any ordering of priorities among community development activities; welfare tasks (community halls, radio sets, tiled roofs) consistently displaced agricultural investment because they were ‘popular, easy of achievement and impress the casual observer’.

• A UN Technical Assistance mission found a development block where village streets had been paved with bricks while the urgent need was to drain excess water from cotton fields to protect the crop—a concrete illustration of misallocated resources.

• Rao argues that the only legitimate first priority is agricultural production, with drinking-water supply as the sole claim to precedence; all social and welfare activities must follow, not precede, the farmer’s economic strengthening.

• The ‘one village, one co-operative’ formula—championed by two Planning Commission members against the Reserve Bank Rural Credit Survey, the Vaikunth Lal Mehta team and all State Governments—produced units too small to be viable; the draft Third Plan’s cap of 1,000 population per co-operative had no evidential basis.

• 63% of trainees in cottage-industry pilot projects abandoned the craft they were trained for; the draft Third Plan offered no estimate of the volume of rural unemployment it aimed to solve, substituting ‘platitudes’ for data.

• The 1956 Central Government order to integrate the Community Development Organisation and the Central Social Welfare Board had, by 1960, been implemented in only 20 out of a planned 100 pilot blocks, with each agency blaming the other.

• The existence of a separate Ministry of Community Development—duplicating Agriculture, Health and Education with its own experts, annual hill-station conferences and a residential institute at Mussoorie—is condemned as an avoidable waste; Rao calls the Ministry an anomaly that should be abolished.