The Gandhian Plan was expounded in 1944 by:

The correct answer is D) Shriman Narayan Agarwal. He drafted The Gandhian Plan of Economic Development for India in 1944, which is why the plan is named after Gandhi. It was built on Gandhian ideas of village-centred, decentralised production, cottage and small industries, and self-sufficiency, and it was a counterpoint to the industry-heavy Bombay Plan of the same year.

• Option A (N. R. Sarkar): He was an official and economist of the period, but he is not the author of this plan.
• Option B (Kasturbhai Lalbhai): He was an industrialist associated with the Bombay Plan group, not the Gandhian Plan.
• Option C (Jai Prakash Narayan): He is linked to the Sarvodaya Plan (1950), a later Gandhian-socialist proposal, not the 1944 plan.

The core concept here is the set of rival planning frameworks of the 1940s: Gandhian, Bombay, People's Plan (M. N. Roy, 1945) and Sarvodaya. For Mains, these debates explain the roots of the tension between large-scale industrialisation and decentralised, labour-intensive development that still shapes policy on MSMEs and rural employment.

Trap: Aspirants often confuse the Gandhian Plan with the Sarvodaya Plan (associated with Jai Prakash Narayan) or with the Bombay Plan, because all three are grouped together as pre-Independence planning documents.