Do you think that Planning in India has been successful? What is significant difference between role and responsibilities of erstwhile Planning Commission and NITI Ayoga?

 Government Failure: During the fifties and the early sixties drawing up of a five-year plan became the norm for developing economies on the demand of world donors. There was a stagnation in seventies due to second world was unable to maintain its pace of growth as planning faced difficulties in coming to grips with an intensive phase of development which needed fine-tuning in many ways. Third world’s development also suffered in many ways. These were treated as failures of planning and intervention and were termed as ‘government failure’.

Planning Commission was an advisory body and so is NitiAyog. But the key difference between them 1s that while the former had powers to allocate funds to ministries and states; this function will be now of finance ministry. NitiAyog is essentially a think tank and a truly advisory body. Other differences are as follows:

The role of states in the planning commission era was limited. The states annually needed to interact with the planning commission to get their annual plan approved. They had some limited function in the National Development Council. Since Niti Ayog has all chief ministers of states and administrators of UT in its Governing Council, it is obvious that states are expected to have greater role and say in planning/ implementation of policies.

The top down approach is reversed in Niti Ayog. It will develop mechanisms to formulate credible plans to the village level and aggregate these progressively at higher levels of government.

The provision of regional council is there in Niti Ayog to address local / regional development issues.

One of the new functions of NitiAyog is to address the need of the National Security in the economic strategy.

How this is to be done - is yet to be watched.

While the planning commission formed Central Plans, Niti Ayog will not formulate them anymore. It has been vested with the responsibility of evaluating the implementation of programmes. In this way, while NitiAyog retains the advisory and monitoring functions of the Planning commission, the function of framing Plans and allocating funds for Plan assisted schemes has been taken away.

Subcribe on Youtube - IGNOU SERVICE

For PDF copy of Solved Assignment

WhatsApp Us - 9113311883(Paid)