India had many significant achievements to its credit in the economic field during the decades of the fifties and the sixties. During the First Plan (1951-56), for example, a country-wide network of community development programmes was established which became an example for many developing countries. India was also the first country to adopt an officially sponsored programme for promoting family planning. In the second and the third plans, we diversified considerably our industrial structure and developed many basic and sophisticated industries in the country. Today, many visitors to India are surprised to find that India has a vast network of modern industry, a large number of very advanced scientific and research establishments and an impressive array of skills and talents. After the disastrous famine years, Indian agriculture witnessed a revolutionary change in technology which has already made us more than self-sufficient in foodgrains.
But despite these impressive changes and achievements, there was an under-current of dissatisfaction in India at the beginning of the Second Development Decade. In part, this was due to the tendency towards political polarisation. But this tendency was only an outward manifestation of the dissatisfaction in the economic field. There was a widespread feeling that while there had been growth, it had made little difference to mass poverty in the country. Even if the poor had not become poorer, they had certainly remained very poor; and in absolute terms, their number had increased. The rich at any rate had become richer; and there was a tendency for wealth and economic power to be concentrated in a few large industrial houses. Production today and distribution tomorrow was not a proposition which was acceptable to the people because they could not understand why giving employment to the unemployed or increasing the productivity of the small farmers and small artisans could be inimical to the overall growth of the country. To some extent, the growing dependence of the country on foreign aid, the growing burden of foreign debt and the use of aid for political and economic pressure in the mid-sixties had also left the people with a distinct sense of dissatisfaction with existing economic policies.