XII Five-Year Plan report will be delayed

The 12th Five-Year Plan will not be ready when the term starts on April because the Planning Commission says the views of a wider section of people hasn’t been captured in the document.

Work on sectoral plans, which also involves extensive consultation with ministries, will continue. The Commission will meet in January to integrate all views and suggestions for a more result-oriented plan.

This is not the first time the final document of a five-year plan has been delayed. Documents for 10th and 11th Plans, too, were finalised after the beginning of the respective periods.

The 11th Plan, which began in April 2007, was approved by the National Development Council (NDC) in December 2007.

The 10th Plan, which began in April 2002, was cleared for implementation by the NDC in December 2002.

Arun Maira, a key member involved in finalisation of the 12th Five-Year Plan, said the delay was largely because the commission wanted to incorporate its ideal of a bottoms-up approach to the process.

“While the sectoral plans will continue to work according to their schedule, what we have now decided is that we need a unified thrust so as to make the common strategy from January to March which could delay the finalisation of the 12th Five-Year Plan document,” Maira said.

The delay won’t be as long as the 10th and 11th plans, he said. “We all felt that the process of devising an impactful and quality 12th Plan document is not complete and hence might need some more weeks than the stated date.”

He said the 12 challenges the Commission had identified when it set out to devise the 12th Five-Year Plan document now needed to be unified with changing conditions, and incorporate all suggestions in this regard.

As the progress of the 12th Plan documentation, the NDC had approved the approach paper, which provides a broad framework of the government policy to be pursued in the period.

The approach paper would be the basis for running government programmes and schemes till the new Plan is unveiled and implemented, officials said.