How the National Planning Committee Shaped Women’s Rights in Pre-Independence India

Long before the Constitution promised equality and before the Planning Commission drew up its first Five-Year Plan, a small group of women and reformers were quietly drafting a blueprint for what gender justice in a future free India should look like. Their forum was the National Planning Committee (NPC), set up by the Indian National Congress in 1938. While the NPC is usually remembered for its work on industry and agriculture, one of its most radical interventions was the Sub-Committee on Woman’s Role in Planned Economy, whose 1939 recommendations sound startlingly modern even today.

Why the National Planning Committee mattered 🔗

The NPC was set up in 1938 by Subhas Chandra Bose, the then Congress President, with Jawaharlal Nehru as Chairman and economist K.T. Shah as Secretary. The push for a national planning body had been building up through the 1930s, with physicist Meghnad Saha persuading Bose that economic development on a scientific basis was essential for an independent India. The committee was inaugurated on 17 December 1938 in Bombay.

The goals of the NPC were ambitious for a country still under colonial rule. It aimed to draft a comprehensive plan for the economic development of India that would guarantee a decent standard of living for the masses. To do this systematically, the NPC set up twenty-nine sub-committees covering agriculture, industries, labour, education, public health, and crucially, the role of women.

A holistic view of development 🔗

What made the NPC different from earlier economic exercises in colonial India was its insistence that development could not be reduced to factory output or crop yields. It treated education, health, housing, labour rights and the status of women as integral parts of the same economic plan. This holistic framing was unusual for its time and is the main reason the NPC is considered a forerunner of independent India’s planning architecture.

The sub-committee on Woman’s Role in Planned Economy 🔗

Among the twenty-nine sub-committees, the one tasked with examining the position of women was set up in 1939. It was chaired by Rani Lakshmibai Rajwade, with Mridula Sarabhai as Member Secretary. Its mandate, as Nehru spelt out, was to study a woman’s role from every angle, social, political, legal and economic. Its final report, titled Woman’s Role in Planned Economy (WRPE), was submitted in 1940, although it was formally published only in 1947 under the editorship of K.T. Shah.

The sub-committee did not approach women’s questions as charity or welfare. It treated women as economic agents whose unpaid and underpaid work was propping up the household, the village and the wider economy. This reframing was itself a quiet revolution.

Equal status as the starting point 🔗

The report opened with a striking proposition: whatever form the new social organisation might take, the basic principle should be equal status for men and women in every respect. This was not a vague aspiration; it shaped every recommendation that followed, from family law to the workplace.

Legal and family reforms 🔗

The sub-committee called for far-reaching changes in personal law. It recommended a uniform civil status for women across communities, equal inheritance rights for daughters and widows, a higher minimum age of marriage, the right to divorce, and protection against polygamy. It also pushed for the recognition of a woman’s individual legal identity, separate from her father or husband, including the right to enter into contracts, own property and act as guardian of her children.

These suggestions ran directly against the grain of customary practice in most Indian communities at the time. Some of them were so radical that, according to a later recollection by women’s rights advocates, Nehru himself urged the chairwoman to “go slow”, fearing that Congressmen would not accept the report if it pushed too hard on equality within the family.

Education and health 🔗

The sub-committee was emphatic that real equality was impossible without universal access to education and healthcare. It recommended free and compulsory primary education for all children, with co-education as the norm, and called for a dedicated push to expand secondary, vocational and higher education for girls. It also wanted adult literacy classes for women, since a huge share of adult women had been kept out of school altogether.

On health, the report linked women’s wellbeing to maternal and child outcomes. It recommended a wide network of maternity homes, creches, primary health centres in villages, and trained midwives. It pushed for maternity benefits to be available to all working women regardless of marital status, an idea that would only be partially realised decades later through the Maternity Benefit Act and its amendments.

Work, wages and the household 🔗

Perhaps the most striking part of the report was its treatment of women’s work. Drawing inspiration from International Labour Organization standards and contemporary debates on planned economies, the sub-committee made several recommendations that still sound progressive:

It argued that a working woman should have full control over her own earnings. It opposed the practice of dismissing women from jobs upon marriage. Where certain jobs were considered “unfit” for women, including night shifts, the report said the answer was not to bar women but to reorganise the workplace to ensure their safety and dignity. It demanded equal pay for equal work, paid maternity leave and crèches at workplaces.

The report also broke new ground by arguing that the individual, not the family, should be treated as the basic economic unit. As long as the family was the unit, women’s wages would be depressed because employers assumed a male breadwinner was the real provider. By shifting to the individual, the report wanted to delink pay and benefits from a woman’s marital status.

It went further. It recognised the unpaid labour of housewives, cooking, child-rearing, fetching water, farm work, as genuine economic contribution and asked that it be counted in national accounting. It even suggested that men should learn household chores so that domestic work was not seen as inherently female. These ideas anticipated arguments that feminist economists in India would make from the 1970s onwards.

Resistance, dilution and the long delay 🔗

The sub-committee submitted its report in 1940, but the NPC’s work was severely disrupted. The Second World War broke out, and many Congress leaders, including Nehru, were jailed between 1940 and 1945, freezing the committee’s work for years.

When the report was finally published in 1947, several of its most radical recommendations had been quietly diluted or ignored. Critics have pointed out that the published version, edited by K.T. Shah, treated the sub-committee as somewhat “naive” about planning, even though its diagnosis of women’s everyday oppression in the family and labour market was sharp and accurate. Many of the suggestions that challenged patriarchal family structures most directly were the ones that did not survive into post-independence policy.

The legacy of the NPC for women’s rights 🔗

Even with these dilutions, the influence of the NPC and its women’s sub-committee on independent India was significant.

From NPC to the Planning Commission 🔗

The NPC laid the institutional and intellectual groundwork for the Planning Commission, set up in 1950, which in turn produced India’s Five-Year Plans. The very idea that the state should plan for human development, not just industrial output, can be traced back to the NPC’s twenty-nine sub-committees. Later, when the Planning Commission began including chapters on women’s welfare and, from the Sixth Plan onwards, on women’s development as a distinct goal, it was drawing on a tradition the NPC had started.

Influence on constitutional and legal reform 🔗

Many of the principles championed by the women’s sub-committee found their way into Articles 14, 15 and 16 of the Constitution, which guarantee equality before the law and prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex. The push for reform of personal law, especially Hindu law, also drew strength from the report’s arguments. The long, contested journey of the Hindu Code Bill between 1941 and 1956, which eventually gave Hindu women rights in marriage, divorce and inheritance, echoed many of the sub-committee’s demands.

Setting an agenda that is still unfinished 🔗

It is striking how many of the WRPE’s recommendations are still on India’s policy to-do list. Recognition of unpaid domestic work in national accounts, equal pay for equal work, accessible childcare, safe working conditions on night shifts, and individual rather than household-based welfare entitlements are debates that continue today. The 1974 report Towards Equality, commissioned by the Government of India, and later policy documents have repeatedly returned to questions that Rajwade and Sarabhai’s sub-committee had already framed in 1939.

In other words, the NPC did not just shape the immediate post-independence policy environment. It set a benchmark against which India’s progress on gender equality continues to be measured almost a century later.

What do you think? 🔗

If the women’s sub-committee’s full set of recommendations had been adopted at independence, how different might the lives of working women, housewives and daughters in inheritance disputes look today? And which of its 1939 demands still feel like unfinished business in your own family or workplace?

References

1. https://nehruarchive.in/organisations/national-planning-committee
2. https://m.thewire.in/article/economy/subhas-chandra-bose-meghnad-saha-and-the-birth-of-the-national-planning-commission
3. https://library.niti.gov.in/cgi-bin/koha/opac-retrieve-file.pl?id=13932e48dd8bc7da60cbafaea68668d7
4. https://feminisminindia.com/2018/12/04/women-economic-report-wrpe/
5. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781351238762-8/sub-committee-women-role-planned-economy-mohan-rao-vina-mazumdar
6. https://archive.nyu.edu/bitstream/2451/34267/2/constitutionalLS.pdf
7. https://newindiafoundation.stck.me/post/9432/Debating-Patriarchy-An-excerpt