The Planning Commission and 5-year plans: India

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content.

The Planning Commission and 5-year plans: India

'90s' liberalism triggered decline of planning era

The Times of India Aug 18 2014

What was the need to have a Planning Commission?

The early days of Independence were chaotic in terms of economic planning. The geographical and economic statistics of the country required drastic revision. India was formed after the integration of many former Indian states that were earlier being governed in different ways. The influx of several million people after partition had aggravated the country's food supply problems. The econo my had also inherited the in flationary pressure caused by World War II and the private sector was not strong and confident enough to step forth. A fresh assessment of the financial and other resources was required and in 1949 the Advisory Plan ning Board appointed by the interim government recom mended the appointment of a Planning Commission.

When was the Planning Commission formed?

The Planning Commission was set up in March 1950 as an executive arm of the Union government and was chaired by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the PM at that time. It was responsible for making an assessment of all the country's resources and planning how they could be used most efficiently. Also, it was supposed to identify the most important priorities of the govern ment. In 1953, scientist and statistician PC Mahalanobis joined the commission.

Are five-year plans (FYPs) unique to India? FYPs were first im plemented by Joseph Stalin in Soviet Un ion in the late 1920s.

This method was ad opted by many other countries. Among the bigger economies, China and India both have continued to use FYPs. China, howev er, has renamed its eleventh FYP (2006-2010) as a guideline (guihua) rather than a plan (jihua). This is seen as the central govern ment signalling a relatively non-interventionist appr oach in economic planning.

What were the focuses of different five-year plans?

The first FYP was focused on agriculture, price stability , power and transport. The sec ond focused on rapid industri alization and was moderately successful at a time when the country faced an acute short age of foreign exchange. The third gave top priority to agriculture to support industries and export, but was a complete failure because of the Indo-China war (1962), Indo-Pak war (1965) and severe drought 1965-66. Defence became an important priority. Thus, the first three FYPs saw resources being spent on creating the massive public sector (steel, rail, power) and building of key infrastructure (hydel projects). Subsequent plans encouraged the Green Revolution, making India self-reliant in food and so on. Since the eighth Plan (1992-97), focus shifted to liberalization and, with that, the decline of the planning process itself.

What are plan holidays?

Plan holidays are declared for years when government is not in the position to make a five-year plan. The Indo-Pak conflict of 1965 caused the first break. Between 1966 and 1969, the government operated through three annual plans. Similarly in 1990, the eighth FYP could not take off because of an unstable political situation.