Making a Self-Reliant Citizen: Technocracy, Rural Redevelopment and the Etawah Pilot

The essay traces the trajectory of India’s first rural development program, the Etawah Pilot program from 1948, which became part of the country’s first five-year plans in 1951 with the support of the US government and the Ford Foundation. With a focus on the project’s two central actors, US architect-planner Albert Mayer and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the essay argues that the Etawah Pilot program was a modernizing experiment in citizen assimilation that became a trans-national model for postwar development aid with the international architect-planner as the traveling technocrat set to develop expertise for newly independent nations.