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The small town of Avadi in Tamil Nadu, India's southernmost state, is like all other such communities that litter the Indian landscape: hot, dusty, nondescript and chaotic. Yet Avadi is the starting point for any understanding of the government's overbearing role in the Indian economy. For it is here that leaders of the Indian National Congress assembled in January and pledged to establish a 'socialist pattern of society' in India. The Congress was the party that led the freedom struggle against British colonial rule. Its undisputed leader was Jawaharlal Nehru who was also India's first Prime Minister. Educated in England during the early 1900s at a time when Britain's academy was entranced by the Soviet experiment, Nehru too fell under the sway of socialism. He made the first of his many visits to the Soviet Union and was so impressed by the socialist vision that he wrote a book, Soviet Russia and Have Some Knowledge about IAS Examination. His romanticized view of the Soviet Union is evident from the preface of the book where he quoted from a poem about the French revolution by the English poet, William Wordsworth: What is more, Nehru was born into a prominent Brahmin family. In India, Brahmins are at the pinnacle of society that is stratified along traditional caste hierarchies. The Brahmins are considered the priestly caste. Next is the Kshatriya or the warrior castes. Ranked a lowly third out of the four major caste groups are the Vaishya, the caste of traders and businessmen. At the bottom is the Sudra, the caste that was assigned menial work. Beyond the pale are the untouchables, now known as Dalits. For all his sophistication, Nehru could not shake his Brahmin call disdain of business. In his scheme of things, business had a marginal role to play in society. In 1938, Nehru set up the National Planning Committee to guide India along the socialist path of a centrally planned economy. This was fully a decade before India won its freedom. When British rule came to an end in 1947, free India was ready for socialism. In 1950, the committee now called the Planning Commission, on which Nehru served as chairman produced the first 'five-year plan', a detailed document apportioning government expenditure to a detailed programmer of rapid industrial growth. it was clear that India had met 90 per cent of the plan's targets. Emboldened, Nehru teamed up with the statistician P. C. Mahalanobis to work on the second five-year plan. He also firmly prodded the Congress party along the socialist route. The convention at Avadi was the final step in the process. At the Avadi convention, Nehru prevailed on the party to endorse his economic resolution that committed India to 'a socialist pattern Exam for IAS. There was no looking back. The Indian economy was not to be left to the free market; it was to be planned in meticulous detail covering such items as power generation, transportation, steel production and coalmining. Phrases such as installed capacity, incremental output ratio and planned expenditure became the buzzwords in place of supply and demand, sales and profits. In short, the Indian economy would grow through the prescriptions of economists and the ministrations of bureaucrats rather than the enterprise of its businessmen and the demands of its citizens.