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Decline of Planning Commission
The failures and difficulties of the Third Plan seem nowhere to have been taken into account in determining the outlines of the Fourth Plan.
The tendency is to attribute the failures of the Third Plan to exogenous factors — the Chinese and Pakistani aggressions, the bad harvest of 1965-66 — and to imply that but for these developments all would have been well.
As a consequence in determining the size of the plan, assessing the resources available, setting the priorities and detailing the means of achieving targets, the Fourth Plan closely follows the Third.
All this points to the lack of sufficient detailed work at the ground level which, in turn, reflects the administrative bias of the organisation and staffing of the Planning Commission,
Any Reform of planning in India must start with reform of the Planning Commission. No other conclusion can be drawn after a perusal of the summaries of the Fourth Plan published in newspapers.
There has been considerable political confusion in India since the work on the Fourth Plan started. It might have been expected that this, and the induction of a new head of the Planning Commission in early 1964, would have helped it to evolve its own ideas on the Fourth Plan in relative distance from the Government and to chalk out a new approach to the content of planning.
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