Frank Lugard Brayne CIE CSI MC VD (6 January 1882 – 3 April 1952) was an administrator in the Indian Civil Service (ICS) during the British Raj era.
He became district officer of Gurgaon, some 40 miles (64 km) from Delhi, at a time when the area, comprising a population of around 700,000, was suffering greatly from a recent influenza epidemic, a failed monsoon and the return of soldiers from the war.
To counter the deprivation, Brayne initiated what became known as the Gurgaon Scheme, in which he hoped to alleviate the plight of peasants in all its aspects by encouraging and facilitating the idea of self-help.
[2] Clive Dewey argued, in his book Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service, that Brayne's approach to rural uplift was bound to fail, because Indian peasants did not share Brayne's evangelical values – not least his belief that poverty-stricken cultivators in famine-stricken areas could revolutionise their standard of living by working harder and practising thrift, without any assistance from the state.
His conclusions, which were supported by years of research in Indian archives and by extensive interviews with Brayne's contemporaries, were accepted by several members of the ICS and have been endorsed by subsequent historians.
Philip Mason, himself a former member of the ICS, and the author of the most famous history of the service, described Brayne as being a dyed-in-the-wool Evangelical, absolutely confident that he was the sole possessor of revealed truth, religious, moral, sanitary and agricultural.
[8] More recently, Atiyab Sultan said that Brayne's interventionism had a "missionary zeal" and that his methods were "more prescriptive" than those of Malcolm Lyall Darling, who was another somewhat maverick British administrator in Punjab.
He believed that Dewey had seriously misrepresented his father, unreasonably portrayed the character of the ICS itself, and misled the Brayne family, whose collection of private papers he used.