Achievements and Limitations of Indian Planning

Over nearly seven decades of planned development, Indian planning -- first under the Planning Commission and now guided by NITI Aayog -- has left a mixed but broadly positive legacy that a Telangana Intermediate commerce planning and NITI Aayog course rightly asks students to weigh on both sides.

Achievements. Planning helped build up a much larger and more diversified industrial base than existed at independence, spanning steel, heavy engineering, power, chemicals and, more recently, information technology and services. It laid the physical infrastructure -- irrigation networks, power generation capacity, roads, railways and ports -- on which later private-sector-led growth could build. The Green Revolution, pursued deliberately through planning, moved India from a food-deficit country reliant on imports to one that is normally self-sufficient in food grains. Planning also expanded the country's educational and health infrastructure and built up a large base of scientific, technical and managerial manpower. Over the long run, the proportion of the population below the poverty line has come down substantially, aided by planned anti-poverty and employment programmes. …