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The one '5' India can do without is the ghost of the Five Year Plan as central to the economic agenda. Once upon a time, it was considered prudent to plan the country's development in discrete five-year units. This was the high-noon of Central Planning, when a few brainy people would set about devising plans for the allocation of the nation's resources to yield the 'greatest common good'. Long-range thinkers, went the rationale, would always outscore myopic for-the-moment players. This was held to be true almost axiomatically. After all, hasn't the story of civilization really been a story of extending the scale of our thinking further and further into the future? Isn't visionary futurism the stuff that sparks the best minds to innovate their way ahead? Except that the best laid plans of mice and men can, and often do, get jeopardized by factors that haven't quite been thought about. That everything will work out precisely as ordained by Central Planners, thus, necessitates the presumption of some kind of omniscience. And that's just for starters. As the years roll on, all it takes is a little bit of addle-headedness, lack of sincerity, corruption or even simple human error on part of Central Planners for the Five Year Plan to be worth less than the paper it's written on. Far safer then, given the operating circumstances, to turn the job of allocating the economy's scarce resources over to an entity over which no particular set of human interests has inordinate control---the market. The forces, that is, of demand and supply. Demand is made up of the many millions who use cash to have their needs fulfilled. Supply is made up of the few who eye that cash for profit. All said, millions of minds making daily buy-sell decisions ought to work better in directing the collective allocation of resources than the minds of a few Planners, no matter how brilliant. But that's not the end of it. A market works smoothly if and only if prices are actually set by the interaction of demand and supply, and profit really is a function of meeting genuine needs. Demand must mean demand. That, alas, doesn't always happen---particularly in economies with a statist past with too much privileged power wielded by too few. These are economies riddled by distortions. Also, there is the question of people who are too unempowered (for socio-economic reasons) to exercise their cash franchise in influencing market outcomes; what about those at the bottom of the pyramid? But then, that is what equal-vote democracy is supposed to address.
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