One size doesn’t fit all; an important lesson that the Indian policymakers took only 65 years to learn.

The Indian government has decided to abolish the Planning Commission, a relic of the Soviet-style central policy mindset, and replace it with the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog), which will serve as a think-tank and a “directional and policy dynamo.” Instead of trying to govern India from New Delhi, NITI will adopt a regional approach. The Prime Minister will head NITI and its Governing Council will comprise States’ chief ministers and Lt. Governors of Union Territories.

The Planning Commission in India was established in March 1950. Over the years, the Commission became a tool to grow the public sector and made the state both the operator and the regulator. The Commission consolidated the control at the centre resulting in made in Delhi policies being forced fed to the States and Union Territories.

NITI, instead, is intended to be a think-tank for the central and the state governments with enough diversity in its central and regional bodies to provide “relevant strategic and technical advice” that will help the Central, State, and local governments deliver on their mandates.

Also read: Planning anew

While India experiments with bold new approaches for planning and governance, Pakistan should also take note. The current structure of Pakistan’s Planning Commission is similar to that of India’s now defunct Commission. Slightly younger than its Indian counterpart, Pakistan’s Planning Commission also adopted the five-year planning cycles that set lofty targets for growth.

However, seldom did the elected governments complete their tenures so that one may evaluate their performance against the five-year plans and the targets they set for themselves.

With 180 million people and almost 800,000 square km in land, Pakistan is a large and complex place. The diversity in cultures, languages, beliefs, climate, and terrain has contributed to the uneven development landscape, where some places are much worse off than the rest.

In human development terms, districts in Balochistan are at the bottom and those in Punjab are at the top. Many would argue that other biases might have also contributed to the disparities in human and economic development in Pakistan.

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It is rather naïve to believe that Pakistan’s complex and diverse challenges can be met by planning done in the P Block of the Cabinet Secretariat in Islamabad. Pakistan’s development challenges are local, not necessarily national. The resulting stunted growth is more pronounced in certain rural districts of Sindh than elsewhere. Still, the indigenous players are neither consulted nor made stakeholders in the centrally planned development schemes.

Often, the planning exercises are merely the aftershocks of multilateral and bilateral donor agreements. Once it is realised that USAID, JICA, CIDA or some other agency has set aside some millions in development aid, work immediately begins on proposals to attract those funds to Pakistan.

The entire process follows a top-down approach where the intended beneficiaries or the local service providers are seldom made part of the negotiations, program design, monitoring, or the ex-poste evaluation. If the international interest fails to materialise, the planning team moves on to other projects.

The main flaw of central planning is that a small group of individuals who are unfamiliar with local needs and resources are handed the job to plan and deliver services and solutions at local levels. Historically, such projects rarely sustain themselves in the long haul. There is always one and often multiple disrupting factors that the outsiders did not account, and which later contribute to the development programme's failure.

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Even though Pakistan has made attempts to devolve control from the centre to the provinces (for instance, in education), Higher Education Commission and Planning Commission are two entities which are still running things centrally, and therefore, inefficiently.

Consider, for instance, a recent meeting of the CDWP committee at the Planning Commission in which several projects for investing in specific programs at individual universities – such as setting up of religious studies chairs in universities – were approved for funding. How this is a concern for a national-level planning body is still an enigma to me.

'Planning' the commemoration of Hali

When an organisation assumes a limitless mandate, it runs the risk of losing focus. A recent meeting at the Ministry of Planning Development and Reform (which oversees the Planning Commission), illustrates this point. Mr Ahsan Iqbal, the minister who also heads the Planning Commission, chaired the meeting. The meeting was held to find ways to commemorate the works of a 19th century Urdu poet, Altaf Hussain Hali.

Here are some of the directives issued by the Minister:

1. Pakistan Post was directed to issue a commemorative stamp to honour Hali.

2. State-owned television channel, PTV, was asked to telecast special programs to highlight Hali’s religiously-inspired poetry. Hali’s most famous work is a long poem in which he laments the demise of Muslim monarchs in the sub-continent.

3. The state-owned Academy of Letters was instructed to hold a special reference for Hali.

4. The provincial education secretaries, who do not report to the federal government, were still instructed to instruct the management of state-owned schools to hold special commemorative events to honour Hali. The Higher Education Commission was instructed the same for similar events to be held at the State-owned universities.

5. The prime minister will be requested to declare 2015 as the “Hali Year on 100th years of Hali’s death anniversary.” Never mind that Hali died in 1914.

6. Finally, the minister directed to hold an international conference to highlight Hali’s role in mobilising the Muslims of South Asia.

It is hard to imagine how any of the above directives are related to the economic development and planning of the nation.

Our country faces poverty, disease, illiteracy, and religious fundamentalism. What Pakistan needs its economic planning ministry to do is a concentrated effort to alleviate poverty, not a concentrated effort to commemorate the 100th death anniversary of an 18th century poet on what is actually his 101st anniversary.

Meanwhile, in India, the new goal for NITI is not just to alleviate but also to eliminate poverty.

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In an earlier piece, I had argued that Pakistan does not need ‘a Planning Commission’, but a network of networks which would engage hundreds if not thousands of accomplished development professionals to meet the planning and development needs of the struggling nation.

In a separate piece, I highlighted how innovations in technology can help crowdsource the intellectual deficit and knowledge gap prevalent in Pakistan.

Pakistan does not need to carry the coffins of failed planning regimes of the Soviet era. The heavy-handed top-down planning led to the collapse of Soviet Union. Pakistan needs to embrace devolution in letter and spirit.

If institutions like the Higher Education Commission and the Planning Commission continue to function as before, any meaningful reform is highly unlikely.