INDIA: 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.