Five-Year Plans of India

Since 1947, the Indian economy has been premised on the concept of planning. This has been carried through the Five-Year Plans, developed, executed, and monitored by the Policy Commission (NITI Aayog after 2014). With the Prime Minister as the ex-officio Chairman, the commission has a nominated Deputy Chairman, who holds the rank of a Cabinet Minister. Montek Singh Ahluwalia is the last Deputy Chairman of the Commission (resigned on 26 May 2014). The Eleventh Plan completed its term in March 2012 and the Twelfth Plan is currently underway. Prior to the Fourth Plan, the allocation of state resources was based on schematic patterns rather than a transparent and objective mechanism, which led to the adoption of the Gadgil formula in 1969. Revised versions of the formula have been used since then to determine the allocation of central assistance for state plans. The new government led by Narendra Modi, elected in 2014, has announced the dissolution of the Planning Commission, and its replacement by a think tank called the NITI Aayog (an acronym for National Institution for Transforming India).

Five-Year Plans (FYPs) are centralized and integrated national economic programs. Joseph Stalin implemented the first Five Year Plan in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. Most communist states and several capitalist countries subsequently have adopted them. China and India both continue to use FYPs, although China renamed its Eleventh FYP, from 2006 to 2010, a guideline (guihua), rather than a plan (jihua), to signify the central government’s more hands-off approach to development. India launched its First FYP in 1951, immediately after independence under socialist influence of first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

The First Five-Year Plan was one of the most important because it had a great role in the launching of Indian development after the Independence. Thus, it strongly supported agriculture production and it also launched the industrialization of the country (but less than the Second Plan, which focused on heavy industries). It built a particular system of mixed economy, with a great role for the public sector (with an emerging welfare state), as well as a growing private sector (represented by some personalities as those who published the Bombay Plan).

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