Nehruvian ideology was wishful thinking

India's Second Five Year Plan saw its task as  

 not merely one of raising living standards,

which meant creating and distributing more food and clothing and housing and medical and educational facilities 

but of generating a dynamism in the economy

which means growth which entails the things I previously mentioned.  

which will lift it to continually higher levels of material well-being and of intellectual and cultural achievements.

This is foolish. Faster growth is achieved at the expense of 'intellectual and cultural achievements'. In Economics, there are always trade-offs. You can either start a factory and spend 18 hours a day trying to grow your business or you can write poetry. You can't do both. True, some cultural and intellectual products- e.g. Cinema or Pure Scientific Research- have high Income Elasticity of Demand- i.e. as you become materially better off you spend a higher proportion of your income on such 'luxuries'.  

A rising standard of material welfare is not an end in itself;

Yes it is. Economics is about the material standard of Living and nothing else.  

it is essentially a means to better and fuller life.

No. It may mean leading a narrower life which is significantly worse in terms of leisure pursuits or the furtherance of spiritual or moral self-cultivation.  

A society which has to devote the bulk of its working hours to the production of the bare wherewithals of life is to that extent limited in its pursuits of higher ends.

Working hours should be devoted to working not pursuing 'higher ends'- e.g. chatting about how God is nice or Capitalism is nasty.   

Economic development is intended to expand the community's productive power and to provide the environment in which there is scope for the expression and application of diverse faculties and urges.

This is Sen's 'Capabilities' bullshit. What is meant is 'though we are economists, we aren't vulgar materialists at all. We don't care about making more stuff. Still, we have to pretend to do so. Thus we lie to ourselves that though more stuff will be produced this is only so that more people have scope to say 'boo to Capitalism! Everybody should have less stuff coz Consumerism is very evil. Did you know that big Companies have Marketing Departments which try to brainwash people into buying food to eat and clothes to wear? That's totes Fascist! Everybody should quietly eat their own shit.' 

It follows then that the pattern and lines of economic development must from the start be related to the basic objectives which the society has in view.

Thus, if you want to raise your income so as to feed your babies, you must start by ensuring that the way you earn your income is related to feeding babies. Since new-born babies are nourished by breast-milk, it is important that you develop the capability to lactate copiously.  

These basic objectives have recently been summed up in the phrase ‘socialist pattern of society’.

i.e. Commissars & chaps on the Planning Commission live large while large sections of the population starve- unless Uncle Sam sends food aid.  

Essentially, this means that the : primary criterion for determining the lines of advance must not be private profit but social gain

i.e. politicians and bureaucrats making out like bandits 

and that the pattern of development and the structure of socio-economic relations should be so planned that they result not only in appreciable increases in national income and employment but also in greater equality in incomes and wealth.

Let everybody else become equally poor. So long as we have the monopoly of power, we will live large.  

The benefits of economic development must accrue more and more to the relatively less privileged classes of society,

which is what happens when productivity rises and thus wages can rise 

and a milieu should be created in which the small man has chances of rising in life.

by going to Cambridge and getting a PhD after which he can join the Planning Commission.  

For creating such an environment, the State has to take on heavy responsibilities.

By letting go of those light responsibilities the Brits discharged so well- viz. defending the country, preventing famine excess mortality, protecting minorities and ensuring the safety of lives and properties. Shite like that doesn't matter in the least. The State should seek for much heavier responsibilities- like denouncing Death for being in the pay of the Undertaker's Cartel. 

The public sector has to expand rapidly.

because everybody wants a Government job- if not for themselves, then for their idiot nephews.  

It has to play a dominant role in shaping the entire pattern of investments—both private and pubIic-

It could 'crowd out' private investment- that's true enough. But then the country would go off a fiscal cliff and so the public sector borrowing requirement would have to be trimmed. 

-in the economy and has to initiate developments which the private sector is unwilling or unable to undertake.

The Government can start a new industry and then privatize it. Simples.  

The responsibility for new developments in certain major lines of activity which require the use of modern technology,

should be left to people who understand and have applied that new technology. Civil servants, journalists, seditious lawyers and agitators aren't qualified to undertake such duties.- 

large-scale production and a unified control and allocation of resources must be undertaken in the main by the State.

But the State- now that the Brits had fucked off- was totally shit.  The plain fact is, Imperial China had centralized, State controlled, mining and metal industries. Europe didn't. Thus competition drove technological innovation. India was following a Chinese model which had failed two hundred years previously. Moreover, India had never been as centralized as China. As for the Soviet Union, by 1985, it was so inefficient, it was devoting 60 percent of GNP to the primary sector. 20 per cent went on the armed forces. That is what you'd expect in a primitive economy. 

Public ownership, partial or complete, and public control

means stupid politicians or sycophantic officials will run industries of which they have no knowledge or experience

or participation in management are specially required in these fields in which technological considerations tend towards a concentration of economic power and, of wealth.

In other words, people who have no talent or knowledge should set up or take over jobs which only a few knowledgeable and talented can do. 

Private enterprise has to play its part within that framework of the overall plan.

Unless it can bribe officials or politicians and gain effective control of production or distribution. Otherwise, it can exit or go into the black economy.  

In a growing economy there is scope both for public and private sectors to expand simultaneously,

Why not just grow the population and the bureaucracy instead?  

but if development is to proceed at the pace envisaged and is to contribute effectively to the larger social ends in view, it is inevitable that the public sector must grow not only absolutely but also relatively to the private sector.

In other words, if what we have envisaged isn't nonsense then we are geniuses. India is lucky to have us. Sadly, these nutters weren't geniuses. What they had envisaged was shit.  

The socialist pattern of society is not to be regarded as a set or rigid pattern.

Because we are just making this shit up as we go along. 

Each country has to develop according to its own genius and traditions,

No. It has to develop in the manner that those who have conquered it want it to. Only if it can defend itself- or is so shitty nobody wants it- can it develop according to its own shitty traditions. 

but it is important to stress certain basic values and the institutional arrangements implied in them. The accent of the socialist pattern is on the attainment of positive goals;

In America, Presidential candidates promised to lower living standards and attain negative goals.  

the raising of living standards, the enlargement of opportunities for all, the promotion of enterpise among the disadvantaged classes,

because if the elite aren't allowed to set up vast industrial plants, the impoverished will certainly do so.

and the creation of a sense of partnership among all sections of the community. The socialist pattern is, one could say a more, concretised expression of the directive principlcs of State policy embodied in the Constitution.

Cow protection was another directive principle. Socialism was just another sacred cow. 

The essential objective is to secure rapid advance along democratic and egalitarian lines.

dynastic rule? Indira Gandhi became President of Congress in 1959. Ten years later she split it and turned it into her family's hereditary property.  Thankfully, assassination tempered autocracy and thus Indians are now better off than North Koreans who, however, enjoy the blessing of democratic, egalitarian, socialist, secular, dynastic rule.