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Paidipaty, Poornima (2020)History of Political Economy 52(3), pp. 473-497.ABSTRACTIn October of 1960, shortly after the conclusion of India’s Second Five-Year Plan, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru convened a high-level expert panel to investigate whether the fruits of recent economic growth had been equitably distributed across the country, or whether benefits had accrued primarily to the nation’s elite. Triggered by sharp public and parliamentary criticisms of Nehru’s ambitious, top-down economic planning regime, the committee was the first expert body to examine changes in the distribution of economic opportunities and rewards in postcolonial India. P. C. Mahalanobis, who also served as the director of the Second Five-Year Plan and who was the chief architect of India’s experiments in large-scale household sampling, headed the panel. The debates and controversies surrounding the work of the Mahalanobis Committee (as it came to be called) expose important tensions in postcolonial expertise. They also help recover earlier framings of inequality, which centered on mid-century concerns about “levels of living” and economic power, rather than the simple distribution of income.EXTRACT"In essence, the Mahalanobis committee, charged with investigating the “distribution of income and levels of living,” was asked to measure and judge the success of Mahalanobis’s own work as the force behind the second plan. Despite the significance of the assigned task, the committee’s work was slow and highly disorganized. It produced an incomplete preliminary report after four long years and a final report in 1969, which set forth a weak and divided verdict. In a further unexpected turn, Mahalanobis split from the rest of the panel to author a very pessimistic analysis of how India’s poorest had faired under a decade of centralized planning. Even this did not cause much of a stir, since more than a decade had elapsed between the collection of data and the committee’s conclusions. What had opened to much national debate and controversy fizzled without much attention or public debate. Despite this, the final report of the Mahalanobis Committee offers important historical lessons for understanding how economic inequality as a political and technical problem was formulated, debated, and measured in the Nehruvian era. As Alain Desrosières explains in The Politics of Large Numbers ([1993] 2002), state-led numerical exercises set national priorities and help identify new social and economic problems." (p. 475)