CENTRAL PLANNING
The Plans which are formulated by the Central Government and financed by it for the implementation at the national level are known as Central Plans. Over the years, the Centre has launched three such plans and the governments have maintained continuity in their implementation. The three central plans are:
A. Five-Year Plans,
B. Twenty-Point Programme, and
C. Member of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme.

THE FIVE YEAR PLANS
This is the most important among the central plans and is being continuously implemented one after the other since planning commenced in India. As planning has been a purely political excercise in India, the five-year plans of the country have seen many unstable and critical moments till date.

First Plan
The period for this plan was 1951–56. As the economy was facing the problem of large-scale foodgrains import (1951) and the pressure of price rise, the plan accorded the highest priority to agriculture including irrigation and power projects. About 44.6 per cent of the plan outlay went in favour of the public sector undertakings (PSUs).

Second Plan
The plan period was 1956–61. The strategy of growth laid emphasis on rapid industrialisation with a focus on heavy industries and capital goods.The plan was developed by Professor Mahalanobis. Due to the assumption of a closed economy, shortages of food and capital were felt during this Plan.

Third Plan

• The Plan period was 1961–65.
• The Plan specifically incorporated the development of agriculture67 as one of the objectives of planning in India besides, for the first times, considering the aim of balanced, regional development.
• Enough misfortunes awaited this plan—two wars, one with China in 1961–62 and the other with Pakistan in 1965–66 along the Gujarat border and a severe drought-led famine in 1965–66 had to be faced.
• Due to heavy drain and diversion of funds, this plan utterly failed to meet its targets.

Three Annual Plans
    •    The period of the three consecutive Annual Plans was 1966–69.
    •    Though the Fourth Plan was ready for implementation in 1966, the weak financial situation as well as the low morale after the defeat by China, the government decided to go for an Annual Plan for 1966–67.
    •    Due to the same reasons the government went for another two such plans in the forthcoming years.
    •    The broader objectives of these Annual Plans were inside the design of the Fourth Plan which would have been implemented for the period 1966–71 had the financial conditions not worsened by then.
    •    Some economists as well as the opposition in the Parliament called this period as a discontinuity in the planning process, as the Plans were supposed to be for a period of five years. They named it a period of “Plan Holiday”, i.e., the planning was on a holiday.

Fourth Plan

• The Plan period was 1969–74.
• The Plan was based on the Gadgil strategy with special focus to the ideas of growth with stability and progress towards self-reliance.
• Droughts and the Indo-Pak War of 1971–72 led the economy to capital diversions creating financial crunch for the Plan.
• The politicisation of planning started from this plan, which took serious ‘populist’ design in the coming plans. Frequent double-digit inflations, unreigned.
• increase in the fiscal deficits, subsidyinduced higher non-plan expenditures and the first move in the direction of ‘nationalisation’ and greater control and regulation of the economy were some of the salient features of this plan, which continued unchanged till the early 1990s.
• The search for political stability at the Centre converted planning into a tool of real politics with greater and greater ‘centralisation’ ensuing plan after plan.

Fifth Plan

• The Plan (1974–79) has its focus on poverty alleviation and self-reliance.
• The popular rhetoric of poverty alleviation was sensationalised by the government to the extent of launching a fresh plan, i.e., the Twenty-point Programme (1975) with a marginal importance being given to the objective of ‘growth with stability’ (one of the major objectives of the Fourth Plan).
• The planning process got more politicised.
• The havocs of hyper-inflation led the government to hand over a new function to the Reserve Bank of India to stabilise the inflation (the function which the RBI carries forward even today).
• A judicious price wage policy was started to check the menace of inflation on the wage-earners.
• This Plan saw an increase in the socio-economic and regional disparities despite the many institutional, financial and other measures which were initiated by the government to attend to them.
• The nationalisation policy continued.
• There was an overall decay in the quality of ‘governance’.
• A nexus of the ‘criminal-politician-bureaucrat’ seems to emerge for the first time to hijack the political system.
• The plan period was badly disturbed by the draconian emergency and a change of the government at the Centre.
• The Janata Party came to power with a thumping victory in 1977.
• As the government of the time had then complete say in the central planning in India, how could the new government continue with the Fifth Plan of the last government which had still more than one year to reach its completion.

The dramatic events related to Indian planning may be seen objectively as given below:
(i) The Janata Government did cut-short the Fifth Plan by a year ahead of its terminal year, i.e., by the fiscal 1977–78, in place of the decided 1978–79.
(ii) A fresh Plan, the Sixth Plan for the period 1978–83 was launched by the new government which called it the ‘Rolling Plan’.

Sixth Plan

• This Plan (1980–85) was launched with the slogan of ‘Garibi Hatao’ (alleviate poverty).
• Already, a programme (the TPP) was tested and tried by the same government in the Fifth Plan which tried to improve the standard of living of the poor masses with the ‘direct approach’ (the idea of poverty alleviation, but such a slogan of ‘Garibi Hatao’ was not given to the programme).
• Some of the major issues addressed by the Plan were—emphasis on socio-economic infrastructure in rural areas; eliminating rural poverty and reducing regional disparities through the IRDP (1979); ‘target group’ approach initiated; a number of national level programmes and schemes were launched during the plan, which tried to attend to the specific areas and the specific concerns of socio-economic development (this is the ‘target group’ approach):

 (i) National Rural Employment Programme (NREP)—1980
 (ii) Restructured Twenty-Point Programme– 1982 eternity you to do we have isn't even 10
 (iii) Biogas Programme—1982
 (iv) Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWERA)—1983
 (v) Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme (RLEGP)—1983
 (vi) Self-Employment to Educated Unemployed Youth Programme (SEEUP)—1983
 (vii) Dairy Development Programme (DDP)—1983
 (viii) Village and Small Industries Development Programme (VSIDP)—1983
 (ix) Tribal Development Agency (TDA)— 1983
 (x) Village and Small Industries Development Programme (VSIDP)—1983
 (xi) National Seeds Programme (NSP)—1983
 (xii) Intensive Pulses Development Programme (IPDP)—1983
(xiii) Intensive Cotton Development  Programme (ICDP)—1983
 (xiv) Khadi and Village Industries Programme (KVIP)—1983
(xv) Programme for Depressed Areas (PDA)—1983
(xvi) Special Programme for Women and Children (SPWC)—1983.

Seventh Plan

• The Plan (1985–90) emphasised on rapid foodgrain production, increased employment creation and productivity in general.
• The basic tenets of planning, i.e., growth, modernisation, self-reliance and social justice remained as the guiding principles.
• The Jawahar Rojgar Yojana (JRY) was launched in 1989 with the motive to create wage-employment for the rural poors. Some of the already existing programmes, such as the IRDP, CADP, DPAP and the DDP were reoriented.

Till date, the government has been evaluating the achievements of all the developmenta  programmes, courtesy the youngest PM of India. Somehow, democracy and development got connected with a major change in the thinking of the political elite, which decided to go in for democratic decentralisation to promote development.
    -    It laid strong foundations for itself as the constitutional amendments—the 73rd and 74th were possible by the early 1990s.
    -    Though the economy had better growth rates throughout the 1980s, specially in the latter half, yet it was at the cost of bitter fiscal imbalances.
    -    By the end of the Plan, India had a highly unfavourable balance of payments situation.
    -    Heavy foreign loans on which the governmental expenditures depended heavily during the period, the economy failed to service.
    -    The Plan was not laid with a strong financial strategy, which put the economy into a crisis of unsustainable balance of payments and fiscal deficits.
    -    India basically tried to attend its growth prospects by commercial and other external borrowings on hard terms, which the economy failed to sustain.
    -    In the process of liberalisation, an expansion of internal demand for the home market was permitted without generating equitable levels of exports and ultimately Indian imports were financed by the costly external borrowings.
    -    Such an ‘inward looking’ fiscal policy proved to be a mistake when the external aid environment for the economy was deteriorating.

Two Annual Plans
    -     The Eighth Plan (whose term would have been (1990–95) could not take off due to the ‘fastchanging political situation at the Centre’.
    -    The pathbreaking and restructuring-oriented suggestions of the Eighth Plan, the sweeping economic reforms ensuing around the world, as well as the fiscal imbalances of the late 1980s were the other important reasons for the delay in the launch of the Eighth Plan.
    -    The new government, which assumed power at the centre in June 1991, decided to commence the Eighth Plan for the period 1992–97 and that the fiscals 1990–91 and 1991–92 should be treated as two separate Annual Plans.
    -    The two consecutive Annual Plans (1990– 92) were formulated within the framework of the approach to the Eighth Plan (1990–95) with the basic thrust on maximisation of employment and social transformation.