New Avatar of Planning Commission

The Prime Minister’s speech on the eve of the Independence Day outlining the need to rethink the existence of the Planning Commission could not be more timely, as the economic situation of the country, both in terms of financial need and allocation, stands much evolved. The central idea behind the mooting of the proposal seems to be a more holistic inclusion of states through a cooperative federalism that the Planning Commission was unable to herald hitherto. This approach was more than evident when the Prime Minister called the Chief Ministers’ meet earlier this month to take all the states on board. While most of the states support the idea of a reformed Planning Commission, the consensus is invariably on an increased role for states.

In the past, especially for the last decade, the Planning Commission has been used as a tool by the Central government to ‘control’ allocation. The Commission in its earlier form has been alleged to have stood for biased and excessively bureaucratic regulatory actions, especially in so far as approvals and sanctions for states were concerned. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Commission has been dubiously labelled by many as ‘control-commission.’

What the new body aims to do differently is to create a discursive platform for an informed debate between the Centre, States as well as experts. The other reformatory leap that this new body proposes to take is to do away with the ‘incremental’ approach ingrained in the Planning Commission (primarily enunciated through its gradual ‘five year’ plans). The Planning Commission currently, therefore, seems to be only doing a catching-up job with the requirements of the states. In order to bring the allocative mechanism of financial resources to the states at par with their demand and make the states more participative, a restructuring of the Planning Commission is essential. The proposed body should intend to transcend the mere role of a body that remains embroiled in allocation of resources to one that fosters growth and development. Unlike the Planning Commission which had a top-to-bottom approach, the new body should adopt a bottom-to-top approach, mainly fuelled by the growth and participation of the states. Another significant change that the new body is likely to have over the old Commission is that it could act as a broad-based platform for larger Centre-State relations (thereby also addressing the issue of Centre-State disputes to a large extent). This will be a welcome change, especially for those states that belong to different parties than the ruling coalition at the Centre. This, in many ways, is an indispensible component of what the Modi government is trying to achieve through a reformed Planning Commission; ‘cooperative federalism.’