Planning System in India

 

Planning Process in India

The planning system in India has been all the more centralised one.Since it is a top-down plan preparation model, it had ignored people’s participation on the whole; this is not advisable in any democratic country especially in India. Again the Indian planning system was allocative and sectoral in nature which resulted in excessive concentration of economic activities in metropolitan regions. Thus lack of spatial concern in economic planning has resulted in unbalanced development. Therefore based on various discussions held in this regard, efforts were made to decentralise the planning system. 

The most important event in the history of decentralised planning process in India was the promulgation of 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment Acts on December 22nd 1992 conferring constitutional status to Local Self-Government Institutions (LSGIs). These Acts were notified by the Central Gazette on April 20,1993 aiming to devolve functional and fiscal powers to the local bodies. This became a landmark in democratic decentralisation in the country, giving Local Self-Government Institutions the required constitutional legitimacy. Thus the 9th Plan was an opening for the States to adopt the decentralised planning system based on bottom up approach. However though a number of sporadic experiments and theoretical manifestations by experts in the realm came along, most of the States in the country did not took up the initiative as envisaged in the Constitutional Amendment Acts.