Mighty Theme .

Prime Minister Nehru hopped spryly onto the rostrum of India's Parliament last week and waved a 641-page, blue-backed volume at the sea of faces before him. "This is the mighty theme of a nation building and remaking itself," he cried. "We had something worthwhile in our first Five-Year Plan and we made good to some extent. This second Five-Year Plan is the real beginning. We have to start from scratch."

Scratch is the word for it. India's vast country has 300 million illiterates, 80% of its population; in its 500,000 villages there are scarcely 250,000 schools. India has almost as many unemployed as the U.S. has jobholders (68 million)--and the number of job seekers rises by 2,000,000 every year. Yet in its first Five-Year Plan India managed to boost food output by 18%, to make itself (given good weather) largely self-sufficient for food. Across the Himalayas, where a rival drama of planned advance is being enacted, the totalitarian techniques of Chinese Communism can claim no such gains on the land.

This time, doubling its planned outlay to $15 billion, India is driving toward industrialization. The goals (trebling steel production, increasing aluminum output sevenfold) may seem extravagant, considering the financial means in sight (India must raise a whopping $1.6 billion in overseas aid, more than three times the $500 million the U.S. sent during the first plan); but nothing less will keep pace with the growth and hopes of India's population. Telling his followers that "it will take many five-year plans before we can bring about a Socialist society," Nehru realistically last week persuaded parliamentary hotheads to reject a measure which would clamp a $5,000-a-year ceiling on income. "Socialism does not mean a dead level of poverty," he snapped.

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