Mid-term appraisal of 12th Five-Year Plan soon

NEW DELHI: The much delayed mid-term appraisal of the 12th Five-Year Plan (2012-17) is likely to be firmed up soon as NITI Aayog officials are working to a tight deadline to finalise the sector-wise performance before the end of this month.

“All divisions have already submitted the first draft of the sector-wise performance last week. This will be finalised and the collated appraisal report will be shared with Bibek Debroy, the permanent member of the NITI Aayog,” said a senior official of NITI Aayog, which has replaced the erstwhile Planning Commission.

The mid-term appraisal of any plan has been traditionally done after two-and-a-half years of the plan period and the report is out by December of the third financial year. This deadline has been breached this time primarily because the plan implementation itself got delayed because of the economic slowdown.

The National Development Council had adopted the plan in December 2012 while the plan proposals should have kicked in from April 2012. This affected implementation and led to cost escalation and inordinate delay in the development delivery process.

Planning minister Rao Inderjit Singh had said after assuming office in June last year that the government should not be in a hurry to appraise the progress of the 12th Plan. “I think we should give more time to ministries to implement the scheme before we do the appraisal,” he had said, thus delaying the appraisal process, which would have otherwise been completed by October last year. The mid-term appraisal is expected to align the targets and policies of the plan with the several reform measures and social sector initiatives of the BJP-led NDA government.

The 12th Plan is different from the previous ones because it was for the first time that the Planning Commission had come out with three different economic scenarios.

As per the “aspirational” scenario one – of strong inclusive growth – India’s economic growth will average 8% in the five years. However, in the “policy logjam” scenario, which is the worst-case model, GDP growth could slow to 5-5.5%, it had forecast.