While the idea of planning emerged as central to Indian nationalist economic thought only after the election of 1937, economic planning was a known concept to Indian thinkers in early twentieth century. Gokhale in 1903 and K T Shah and Visvesvaraya in the early twenties had stressed the importance of economic planning. In the early years of the thirties, people like Visvesvaraya, Mitter, Birla and Sarkar were enthused by the de facto recognition by the British rulers of the Indian demand for a positive role of the state in organising the socio-economic development of the country. This allowed them to formulate blueprints of plans and appeal to the colonial regime to implement them. This article discusses the early British efforts at planning in India with an attempt to explicate the logic of this effort and its failure. The mode and the economic objectives of planning attempted at by the British officials during 1930-34 did not differ qualitatively from what Indian planners were to advance later. This study, it is hoped, will enable us to understand better both the ideology of the colonial state during the last two decades of British rule in India and that of a bourgeoisie which grew up under colonial aegis and aspired to build up its own new state.