Planning now and then montek singh biography

Planning then and now

MONTEK SINGH AHLUWALIA

A question frequently asked today is whether planning has any relevance in a world of economic liberalization and the market economy.

The short answer is that it does, but not the kind of planning we practised in the past which derived its rationale from the belief that centralized control on resource allocation, with extensive intervention in private sector decision-making, was necessary to achieve rapid growth.

Amartya Sen’s article, which is reprinted in this volume but which first appeared in the Seminar issue on Freedom and Planning almost fifty years ago, provides a flavour of the earlier approach.

Sen argued then that planning was necessary not only to achieve distributional objectives – which he points out is a traditional and much discussed basis for state intervention – but also to achieve a high rate of growth. He recognized that the industrialized world had achieved industrialization without planning and acknowledge