THE Prime Minister’s Committee on Civil Service Reforms has finalised its core recommendations, yet omitted any clear roadmap for the Planning Commission.
asserted
Committee → finalise → Commission
The latter is routinely described as dysfunctional.
asserted
latter → describe → ?
The more useful question is whether Pakistan will do what India did when its own planning body stopped delivering, or take a different course altogether.
asserted
body → do → course
The two commissions began as near-twins.
asserted
commissions → begin → twins
India’s was founded in 1950, Pakistan’s in 1953, both modelled on Soviet-style central planning and staffed by trained economists
asserted
both → found → economists
Both were extra-constitutional bodies, created by executive order.
asserted
Both → create → order
Both were nominally chaired by the head of government and run day to day by a deputy chairman.
asserted
Both → chair → chairman
Both produced Five-Year Plans as their central output and controlled how resources moved from the centre to the provinces or states.
asserted
resources → produce → provinces
For roughly three decades, they were the same institution representing two flags.
asserted
they → represent → flags
The split started in the late 1980s with a fork in the road that both countries reached and only one of them took.
asserted
one → start → them
India hit its own balance-of-payments crisis in 1991.
asserted
India → hit → 1991
It liberalised, and it grew out of the crisis rather than falling into a cycle of dependency.
asserted
it → liberalise → dependency
Pakistan entered IMF structural adjustment in 1988 and never left.
asserted
Pakistan → enter → 1988
That single divergence did more to determine the two institutions’ fates than anything that followed.
asserted
that → do → anything
Since 1988, IMF adjustment programmes have taken precedence over what became, in Pakistan, the largely academic exercise of five-year planning.
asserted
what → take → planning
The Commission became just another ministry, concerned mainly with approving projects, and constrained even there by a development budget whose size the finance ministry set.
asserted
ministry → become → size
India’s Commission kept setting the fiscal and growth framework that the finance ministry worked within.
asserted
ministry → keep → that
Pakistan’s relationship has flipped: the framework now comes from Washington, and the Commission works around it.
asserted
Commission → flip → it
For a while, India’s Commission adapted.
asserted
Commission → adapt → while
It absorbed the human development agenda from Mahbub ul Haq’s 1990 Human Development Report and embedded the eight National Missions of the 2008 National Action Plan on Climate Change into successive Five-Year Plans.
asserted
It → absorb → Plans
It completed 12 plans across 65 years.
asserted
It → complete → years
But incremental change has a shelf life.
asserted
change → have → life
By the early 2010s, India’s economy had become too large, too market-driven and too federally assertive for a centralised allocator to keep dictating terms to states that no longer needed its money.
asserted
that → become → money
In 2014, the Modi government dissolved the Commission and replaced it with NITI Aayog, a leaner think tank with no power to allocate funds, built around advisory strategy, SDG tracking and competition between states.
asserted
government → dissolve → states
The point is not that India dissolved a failing institution.
asserted
India → dissolve → institution
It dissolved a working one, because a model built for 1950 was not fit for 2015.
asserted
model → dissolve → 2015
The civil service reform committee has left out crucial reform for planning institutions.
asserted
committee → leave → institutions
Pakistan never reached that fork, because it never adapted enough to outgrow the old model in the first place.
asserted
it → reach → place
Where India’s Commission built capacity and then had to be redesigned, Pakistan’s mostly stood still.
asserted
Pakistan → build → capacity
The 18th Amendment in 2010 devolved 17 ministries to the provinces.
asserted
Amendment → devolve → provinces
But nobody redesigned what the federal Planning Commission should do once the subjects it used to plan for no longer belonged to it.
asserted
it → redesign → it
It was recast into a full ministry in 2013-14, gaining nominal breadth, Vision documents, SDG coordination, CPEC planning, and losing whatever independence it once had.
asserted
it → recast → independence
Four provincial planning and development departments expanded around it, each building its own project pipeline — and national development spending across federal and provincial channels now exceeds Rs3.5 trillion.
asserted
spending → expand → trillion
The PSDP, the Commission’s one remaining function, amounts to just seven per cent of the federal budget, its ceiling fixed by the Finance Division, the IMF interlocutor.
asserted
ceiling → remain → Division
This is where the comparison stops.
asserted
comparison → stop → ?
NITI Aayog, for all its own gaps, has a claim: a 165pc increase in renewable capacity in a decade, an NDC (Nationally Determined Contributions) process it coordinated across ministries and industry, and the world’s first government-led subnational SDG index, lifting India’s national SDG score from 58 to 71 between 2018 and 2024 by making states compete on published rankings.
uncertain
states → have → rankings
It has real failures too.
asserted
It → have → failures
But it measures them.
asserted
it → measure → them
It tracks 113 indicators across every state and publishes the results.
asserted
It → track → results
Pakistan has no institution that does either job for its own provinces.
asserted
that → have → provinces
…and 7 more, not listed.
The Aporia
