A Machinery-Oriented Plan!

AS IN EARLIER PLANS, the early chapters of the Draft Outline of the Fourth Plan are devoted to setting out the general approach and strategy. In them the philosophy and the aspirations of planning, which can never be adequately expressed in the statistics of outlays and targets with which the rest of the document is cluttered, are sought to be expounded. Here presentation and language can do much to lend conviction to the exposition — it was not for nothing that the first three Plans bore the imprint of 'Pandit Nehru's eloquent and evocative prose.

Judged by even much lower standards, the present Draft Outline is a disappointment. The Introduction and the chapters on "Approach to the Fourth Plan" and "SelfReliance and the Perspective for Development" can hardly be termed eloquent or evocatives; worse, alltoooften the drafting is confused and laughably wordy. Surely, there is some confusion between cause and effect in the statement that "a major cause of the unsatisfactory record of the Third Plan ... is the delay in the achievement of its targets" (emphasis added). Again, it should not have been impossible to find a less unintelligible officialese for "functionally avoidable lowering of tax receipts".