Abstract
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.
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