Podcast with Nikhil Menon, author of “Planning Democracy: Modern India’s Quest for Development”

In 2014, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi closed the Planning Commission, which he accused of stifling the country’s growth and being a holdover from the country’s time as a socialist country. It was an ignoble end to the government body, which in the early days of independence charted the country’s Five-Year Plans for economic development.

Nikhil Menon, in his first book Planning Democracy: Modern India’s Quest for Development from Cambridge University Press, looks at how India’s efforts towards economic planning helped the country find a path between Western and Soviet economic models, supercharged the growth of Indian statistics, and tried to foster a more public democracy.

In this interview, Nikhil and I talk about planning and democracy, statistics, and perhaps one of the book’s central figures, Professor Mahalanobis, the father of Indian statistics.

Nikhil Menon is a historian of modern South Asia, specializing in the political and economic history of 20th-century India. His research explores the histories of democracy and development in independent India.