Reclaiming Public Provisioning Priorities for the 12th Five Year Plan
The Draft Approach Paper to the 12th Five Year Plan envisages a very small increase in the overall magnitude of the Gross Budgetary Support for the Plan by the Central Government over the next five years. This implies that the 12th Five Year Plan might witness a continuation of 'cost effective' approaches to public provisioning in the social sectors and towards interventions in critical economic sectors (like agriculture and rural development), instead of promoting entitlements for people in critical sectors. We must note in this context that the overall magnitude of public resources available to the government in India for making investments towards socio-economic development remains inadequate in comparison to several other countries, mainly owing to the low magnitude of tax revenue collected.
The formulation of the 12th Five Year Plan has given the Planning Commission, Union Government and State Governments a major opportunity to recognise and address the fundamental gaps in the overall paradigm of development planning in our country, design of specific Plan interventions and their implementation. This publication attempts to highlight some of these gaps in a number of critical sectors and also discusses some of the possible measures that could be adopted in the 12th Plan.
