A House Panel has questioned the role and rationale of the country's supreme policy-making body, the Planning Commission, stating point-blank that “planning in the country has failed to deliver the desired results owing to disjunction between planning and budgeting, lack of synchronisation between the plans/policies and implementation and monitoring”.

In its report analysing the Demands for Grants (2011-12) of the Ministry of Planning, the Standing Committee on Finance, chaired by the BJP leader, Mr Yashwant Sinha, bluntly said that despite the objective of raising the standard of living of the people by augmenting production and optimising available resources when the Plan panel was set up, “the extent of progress made has been far from satisfactory”.

While conceding “a good number of policy measures initiated and interventions made at different levels”, the panel unsparingly pointed out that “the development policies have not benefited the majority of the people in the country, which could be widely seen through prolonged prevalence of imbalance in development across States and within States, unsatisfactory performance in human development parameters, failure in achieving the desired agricultural growth rate, high drop-out at primary level education, absence of universalisation of higher education, mismatch between demand and supply of skilled personnel, inability in earmarking 2-3 per cent of GDP to the health sector as envisaged”. It deplored that the basic objectives of planning are yet to be achieved.

Expert group

In a forthright indictment on the performance of the Ministry of Planning, it said: “when the issue calls for an immediate and serious introspection, the Ministry is satisfied with tailor-made solutions like implementation of UID (Unique Identification) scheme”. It faulted both the Ministry of Planning and the Planning Commission for not having “a futuristic vision in social planning in the post-reforms period.”

It further noted that while planning is very much relevant in the country, “the Planning Commission has to come to grips with the emerging social realities to reinvent itself to make itself more relevant and effective for aligning the planning process with economic reforms and is consequences, particularly for the poor”.

In this context, the Committee has urged upon the Government to constitute an Expert Group “immediately for evaluating the performance of the Planning Commission and redefining its role and objectives so as to relate the planning process to the life of the common man and its role in the implementation of programmes and schemes”.

Lack of accountability

After scrutinising the demands for grants of the Ministry of Planning, the panel caustically stated that the formulation of budget for plan programmes and schemes has been reduced to an exercise of unrealistic estimates, under-utilisation of funds and huge spending in the last quarter”. Elaborating this, it said the plan provision in 2009-10 of Rs 452 crore at budget estimate was reduced in revised estimates to Rs 109 crore but only Rs 86.33 crore was spent, of which as much a 58 per cent or Rs 49.67 crore was spent in the last quarter. In a like manner, the plan allocation of Rs 2,000 crore in budget estimate 2010-11 was reduced to Rs 1,045 crore in the revised one. But the Ministry could spend only Rs 219.68 crore (till March 11, 2011) of which Rs 139.84 crore or 64 per cent was incurred in the last quarter. This is despite the norms stipulated by the Ministry of Finance that not more than 33.33 per cent would be spent in the last quarter, clearly “showing lack of financial discipline and accountability.”

As a result, the plan programmes and schemes have been badly bruised with substantial shortfall in utilisation of funds year-after-year, it said citing the case of scheme “New Initiative in Skill Development through PPP” where the shortfall in utilisation of budgeted expenditure was as much as 79 per cent in 2009-10 and 70 per cent in 2010-11(expected).

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