| As the Congress president,
Bose appointed the National Planning Committee with Jawaharlal
Nehru as its chairman. (He made sure that the Committee
included the representatives of village industries.) While
inaugurating the Planning Committee, he said that industries
could be categorised into cottage industries, medium-
scale industries, and large-scale industries, and that
only through proper planning it would be possible to lay
down the scope of each of these categories of industries.
Bose believed in a multi-class approach
to India's reconstruction. Eminent scientists such as
Meghnad Saha, and engineers such as Visweswaraiya and
left-minded economists such as K.T. Shah often influenced
his views and thoughts. Of course, Subhas Chandra Bose
was not the first person to talk of planning but he
was the first Congress president who, in his official
capacity, advocated planning and went about translating
his ideas into action.
Bose was a supporter of decentralised
development and municipal socialism. He was for using
democratically elected local governments such as the
municipality to manage basic civic services such as
water supply, roads, primary education, public health
and other such services. He saw the civic bodies as
"poor men's corporations" driven by "the
passion, the zeal and the desire to serve the poor."
He added a new meaning to 'municipal
socialism' by defining it as a collective effort to
serve the entire community. He said that if all municipal
corporations adopted such an approach, it would be a
service not only to the city concerned but also to the
whole of humanity. Hence he advocated wide-ranging powers
and financial resources to the local bodies.
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