Abolishing India's Planning Commission: The Results After Five Years Santosh Mehrotra and Sylvie Guichard, Eds., Planning in the 20th Century and Beyond: India's Planning Commission and the NITI Aayog (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2020) K.D. Saksena, NITI Aayog and Planning Commission: Some Reflections (Delhi: Shipra Publications, 2019) Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Backstage (Delhi: Rupa 2019)

• Published date: 01 July 2021
• Author: Alasdair Roberts
• Date: 01 July 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13404

Book Reviews 799

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 81, Iss. 4, pp. 799–805. © 2021 by

The American Society for Public

Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13404.

Reviewed by: Alasdair Roberts

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Abolishing India’s Planning Commission:

The Results After Five Years

Santosh Mehrotra and Sylvie Guichard, Eds., Planning in the

20th Century and Beyond: India’s Planning Commission and the

NITI Aayog (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2020)

K.D. Saksena,NITI Aayog and Planning Commission: Some

Reflections (Delhi: Shipra Publications, 2019) Montek Singh

Ahluwalia, Backstage (Delhi: Rupa 2019)

Support at the Top

In most of the world, high-level government

planning has been out of fashion for almost half a

century. During the neoliberal era—roughly from

1978 to 2008—the drive was to liberate markets,

shrink government, and limit the discretion of

politicians. The ambition was to create disciplined and

even straitjacketed states (Friedman1999, chapter8;

Roberts2010). Because politicians lacked significant

room for maneuver, there did not seem to be much

need for high-level planning. The neoliberal polity

was conceived as a machine that would go by itself.

By now it is clear that we have entered a more turbulent

and dangerous period of history. Financial crises, the

COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, geopolitical

shifts, technological innovations—all of these factors

have made statecraft more difficult. Since 2000, we

have abandoned the model of the straitjacketed state

(Roberts2020a, 2020b). In this new era, political

leaders have been forced regularly to make fateful

decisions under conditions of stress and uncertainty.

In fact, the global populist backlash has included a

demand for “strong leaders” who are prepared to take

the reins and act boldly (Mudde and Kaltwasser2017,

chapter4). But do modern-day leaders have the

institutional support they need to act intelligently as

well as boldly? Are governments built so that leaders

are aware of long-term challenges, and positioned to

address these challenges in a deliberate way?

These broad questions hang in the background

as we consider the rise and fall of India’s Planning

Commission and the performance of its successor,

the organization known as NITI Aayog. For more

than 60 years, the Planning Commission was one

of the most important institutions within India’s

central government. However, Prime Minister

Narendra Modi announced the end of the Planning

Commission in August 2014. The Twelfth 5-Year

Plan, adopted in 2012, was also the nation’s last.

A note prepared for the Indian Cabinet in 2014

described the Commission as a “relic” of a long-

gone era when central planning was favored by

governments around the world. India was simply

catching up with the times. In January 2015, the

Commission was replaced by a smaller and less

powerful think tank called NITI Aayog.

Five years later, can we say that Modi made the right

decision? Three new books—an edited volume by

Santosh Mehrotra and Sylvie Guichard, an essay by

former planner K.D. Saksena, and an autobiography by

Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the former deputy chairman of

the Planning Commission—suggest not. Other observers

also dismiss NITI Aayog as a weak organization that is

too tightly controlled by Prime Minister Modi.

Nobody calls for a return to the kind of Planning

Commission that existed before 2015. But many see

the need for some kind of institution that can maintain

a “strategic focus” on policies that are essential for

balanced long-term growth (Mohan2019, 55). They

see planning as a counter to the centrifugal tendencies

that have always operated in large political systems

like India, and which have intensified in recent years.

Some critics of NITI Aayog look to China for a model

of planning. But the Chinese approach to planning is

neither feasible nor desirable in the Indian setting. An

alternative would be a “monitory institution” that has

autonomy, resources, and authority to act as a voice for

balanced long-term development.1

The Birth of Planning

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, established

the Planning Commission in 1950. Like most of his

Alasdair Roberts is a professor of public

policy at the University of Massachusetts

Amherst. His latest book is Strategies

for Governing: Reinventing Public

Administration for a Dangerous Century

(Cornell University Press, 2019).

Email: asroberts@umass.edu

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