On March 15, 1950, Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru set up the Planning Commission under the government’s wing, with no specific constitutional or legal roots. Born out of a government resolution, this move aimed to enhance the lives of Indians by smartly harnessing the country’s resources, ramping up production, and ensuring job opportunities for all. The Planning Commission, led by Pandit Nehru, took on the task of evaluating India’s resources, finding efficient ways to use them, and establishing priorities for the nation’s development.
Challenges of Planning Commission
- There’s no solid system for keeping in touch with states regularly.
- The platform for sorting out problems between the central government and states, as well as within ministries, is not very effective.
- There’s a lack of skilled experts and domain knowledge, along with weak connections with think tanks.
- Moreover, there’s limited access to expertise outside the government.
- The body couldn’t successfully carry out land reforms.
- It didn’t have the power to hold the union, states, and union territories accountable for failing to meet their targets.
- The plans were designed with a ‘one size fits all’ approach, leading to many of them not producing tangible results.
- There were issues with the weak implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of plans.
Advantages of Planning Commission
- Planning Commission laid emphasis on infrastructure developments and capacity building.
- As a result, huge investments were made in education, energy, industry, railways and irrigation.
- India became self-sufficient in agriculture and made great progress in capital sector goods and consumer sector goods.
- Planning Commission introduced many remarkable concepts like nationalisation, green revolution etc and transformed itself to align with new concepts like liberalisation, privatisation and inclusion.
- Planning commission made great emphasis on social justice, governance, employment generation, poverty alleviation, health and skill development.
- The transformation of India from a poor to an emerging economic power is credited to the orderly and phased manner in which planning was implemented.
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