Q.Give a brief account of the Five Year Plans implemented in India.

India implemented twelve Five Year Plans between 1951 and 2017, each with its own thrust.

India's Five Year Plan system ran, with a short break of annual plans in the mid-1960s, from the First Plan (1951-56) to the Twelfth Plan (2012-17) -- twelve plans over roughly sixty-six years, each drawing on the successes and shortfalls of the plan before it.

The First Plan (1951-56) focused on agriculture and irrigation, alongside the urgent task of resettling refugees displaced by Partition. The Second Plan (1956-61) is best remembered for the Mahalanobis strategy, which prioritised the rapid build-up of heavy and basic industries -- steel, machine-building and power -- on the reasoning that domestic capacity to produce capital goods was the key to sustained, long-run industrialisation. From the Third Plan onward, and particularly from the mid-to-late 1960s, planning gave growing emphasis to achieving self-sufficiency in food grains; this culminated in the Green Revolution, the spread of high-yielding seed varieties, chemical fertilisers and expanded irrigation that transformed Indian agriculture's productivity. Through the 1970s and 1980s, plans increasingly incorporated poverty-alleviation and employment-generation schemes alongside continued investment in infrastructure and industry. Following the 1991 balance-of-payments crisis, India undertook liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation (LPG) reforms, and the plans from this point on became progressively more indicative, opening greater space for private investment, foreign capital and market-determined prices rather than direct state control. The later plans -- the Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth -- placed growing emphasis on inclusive growth, human development and environmental sustainability, alongside the traditional foc …

Students should avoid inventing precise plan-wise growth-rate figures they are unsure of; it is safer and more accurate to describe each plan's thrust qualitatively, as the syll …