Planning in India: From the Planning Commission to NITI Aayog

India adopted formal, centralised economic planning soon after Independence. The Planning Commission was set up in 1950 as the country's central planning authority, tasked with assessing the nation's resources, formulating a plan for their most effective use, and determining priorities. It went on to formulate a long series of Five-Year Plans, beginning with the First Five-Year Plan (1951-56), through which national development targets, sector-wise resource allocations and public-sector investment programmes were framed for the entire country.

Over more than six decades, India's Five-Year Plans placed a shifting emphasis on different priorities across different plan periods — agriculture and irrigation, heavy and basic industries, poverty alleviation, and later, growth with social justice and inclusive growth — but the underlying institutional model, a single central authority framing detailed sectoral targets for the whole country, remained broadly the same throughout. …