Nov 03 2022 to Nov 03 2022 6:30 p.m.

EVENT HAS ENDED

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

This conversation will revolve around the themes of the recent book, Planning Democracy: How a Professor, an Institute, and an Idea Shaped India by Nikhil Menon. The book explores how planning and development became so central to the story of modern India. After nearly two centuries of colonial rule, economic planning was meant to be independent India’s route to prosperity. Planning Democracy is about one of the great experiments of the twentieth century—how India combined Soviet-inspired socialist Five Year Plans and western liberal democracy at a time when these visions appeared contradictory. It 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 the gifted scientist PC Mahalanobis and pioneering institutions like the Indian Statistical Institute. It also became a mode of nation-building, shaping the nature Indian democracy and how it was seen on the global stage. The Five-Year Plans loomed so large that they linked surprisingly far-flung contexts—from Prime Ministers to computers to Bollywood to Hindutva. This discussion—featuring Sushmita Pati, Rajendran Narayanan, and Nikhil Menon—will explore the ways in which the legacy of India’s experiments with planning, development, and democracy continue to shape India and the world. This will be followed by a Q&A.