Gadgil and his Equations

Born today in 1901, Dhananjay Gadgil was the guy behind the fair price shops and rationing system in India. As a vice-president of the Planning Commission of India, he devised a formula to decide the allocation of central assistance to states - a true economist to the core!

Dhananjay Ramchandra Gadgil; Source:Public Domain

Born to a Brahmin family, who had been relocated from the Konkan region, Dhananjay Ramchandra Gadgil came into this world on 10 April 1901 in Nasik, Maharashtra.

His early schooling was at his familial city of Nagpur after which he moved on from Mumbai College and continued to Cambridge College from where he got a masters degrees in Arts and Literature.

It is rumoured that the very thesis submitted by Gadgil for his masters in Literature degree was so well-written that it was immediately published as a book and distributed in 1924! Once back in India, Gadgil joined the Maharashtra  government services yet quit it in 1925 to fill in as the head at the Maganlal Thakordas Balmukunddas Expressions School, Surat.

Afterward, he came to be associated with the Servants of India Society of Gopal Krishna Gokhale and held the post of the founding director at the Gokhale Foundation of Politics and Economics (GIPE) in Pune in the year 1930. His residency at the organisation endured till 1933 during which time he embraced a few ventures identified with the improvement of provincial economy.

In 1946, the Maharashtra government approached him and A. D. Gorwala, a civil servant, with the duty of formulating an arrangement for the appropriation of food in the midst of shortage, and they suggested the presentation of fair price shops and rationing, supposedly against the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi. He was additionally associated with the Samyukta Maharashtra Development and is known to have drawn up an arrangement for the development of the cities; Mumbai and Pune.

On his birth centenary year, the Maharashtra Economic development Council founded a yearly event dedicated to him; the Gadgil Centenary Memorial Lecture.

In 1969, he developed rules for the equation, famously known as the Gadgil equation, which was in the Fourth and the Fifth Five-Year Plans of India. The recommendations depended on the boundaries like Populace (60%), Per Capita Pay (10%), Duty Exertion (10%), On-going Water system and Force Tasks (10%) and Uncommon Issues (10%).

Afterwards, on-demand from the state governments, the equation was reexamined (adjusted Gadgil recipe) as Populace (55%), PCI (25% – determined by deviation and distance strategies), Financial Administration (5%) and Uncommon Improvement Issues (15%).

The equation once again came under scrutiny by the then President of India, Pranab Mukherjee who included an additional set of rules and frameworks to the study, thereby leading the equation to finally being known as the Gadgil-Mukherjee equation.