Under Jawaharlal Nehru the new republic embraced state-led planning through Five-Year Plans, public-sector heavy industry, dams and steel towns, and the building of Chandigarh by Le Corbusier as a symbol of a modern India. Nehru called the great dams the temples of modern India, framing infrastructure and the planned city as engines of national development. New industrial townships such as Bhilai and Rourkela embodied the model.
It established the planned, modernist, state-directed city and township as instruments of Indian nation-building.
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