Lack of planning
THE Prime Minister’s Committee on Civil Service Reforms has finalised its core recommendations, yet omitted any clear roadmap for the Planning Commission. The latter is routinely described as dysfunctional. Whether or not that description is true is beside the point. 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.
The two commissions began as near-twins. India’s was founded in 1950, Pakistan’s in 1953, both modelled on Soviet-style central planning and staffed by trained economists. Both were extra-constitutional bodies, created by executive order. Both were nominally chaired by the head of government and run day to day by a deputy chairman. Both produced Five-Year Plans as their central output and controlled how resources moved from the centre to the provinces or states. For roughly three decades, they were the same institution representing two flags.
The split started in the late 1980s with a fork in the road that both countries reached and only one of them took. India hit its own balance-of-payments crisis in 1991. It liberalised, and it grew out of the crisis rather than falling into a cycle of dependency. Pakistan entered IMF structural adjustment in 1988 and never left. It is now on its 25th programme. That single divergence did more to determine the two institutions’ fates than anything that followed. Since 1988, IMF adjustment programmes have taken precedence over what became, in Pakistan, the largely academic exercise of five-year 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. India’s Commission kept setting the fiscal and growth framework that the finance ministry worked within. Pakistan’s relationship has flipped: the framework now comes from Washington, and the Commission works around it.
For a while, India’s Commission adapted. 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. It completed 12 plans across 65 years. But incremental change has a shelf 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. 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. The point is not that India dissolved a failing institution. It dissolved a working one, because a model built for 1950 was not fit for 2015.
The civil service reform committee has left out crucial reform for planning institutions.
Pakistan never reached that fork, because it never adapted enough to outgrow the old model in the first place. Where India’s Commission built capacity and then had to be redesigned, Pakistan’s mostly stood still. The 18th Amendment in 2010 devolved 17 ministries to the provinces. But nobody redesigned what the federal Planning Commission should do once the subjects it used to plan for no longer belonged to 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. 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. 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.
This is where the comparison stops. 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. It has real failures too. But it measures them. It tracks 113 indicators across every state and publishes the results. Pakistan has no institution that does either job for its own provinces. Nobody ranks them on outcomes. Nobody has evaluated whether the PSDP, after decades and trillions of rupees, has achieved what it was funded to achieve.
If we count what’s missing, nine separate failures emerge: a macro framework that has surrendered to the IMF since 1988; a series of launched and abandoned Vision documents; a collapse in human development that has left Pakistan’s HDI ranking 20 places behind India’s, with Bangladesh ahead of both; a PSDP process captured by political patronage rather than sustainable development logic; a think-tank function that atrophied while Mahbub ul Haq’s own institutional descendants scattered abroad; a climate and environmental blindspot in a country that ranks among the 10 most climate-vulnerable states; a federal role left undefined after the 18th Amendment; no subnational monitoring or evaluation framework; and, binding all of it together, an institution that has expanded in size while abandoning its function, producing the appearance of planning where substance no longer exists.
Put together, this is not one failure of implementation. It is three failures of obsolescence, layered on top of each other: 1) globally, the development agenda moved from GDP and infrastructure towards human capabilities, the SDGs and climate finance, and the Commission never followed, 2) domestically, four periods of military rule and an un-redesigned federal mandate after 2010 did separate, serious damage, and 3) functionally, what remains is a gatekeeping exercise inside a PSDP ceiling set in Washington, approving a backlog of projects, the so-called throwforward, worth several trillion rupees more than can ever be funded.
Pakistan does not lack planning institutions. It lacks a plan for its planning institutions. That is the reform the PM’s committee left out, and the one that was never optional.
The writer is a climate expert.
Published in Dawn, September 24th, 2026
