Five-Year Plans officially declared dead from FY17

The Niti Aayog is preparing 15-year vision document that will replace the Five-Year Plan from the next financial year

It is official: Five-Year Plans will come to an end with the conclusion of the 12th Five-Year Plan on March 31, 2017, closing another chapter in India’s Nehruvian legacy.

A Budget circular issued by the finance ministry on Thursday said, “There will henceforth be no Five-Year Plan post the 12th Plan.” The circular basically justified the need for doing away with Plan and non-Plan classification of government expenditure and replacing it with revenue and capital break-up.

There were indications that the Five-Year Plans would be scrapped once the Planning Commission was replaced with the Niti Aayog from January 1, 2015.

However, Niti Aayog will come up with a review of the 12th Five-Year Plan. It will not be a mid-term review, but an assessment of the first four years of the Plan, which means a period between 2012-13 and 2015-16, sources said.

The Niti Aayog is already preparing 15-year vision document that will replace the Five-Year Plan from the next financial year.

This will be framed keeping in mind the country's social goals and the sustainable development agenda.

There will also be a seven-year National Development Agenda which will lay down the schemes, programmes and strategies to achieve the long-term vision. Officials said the National Development Agenda will be reviewed after a gap of every three years to ensure that it was aligned with financial needs and requirements.

For the first Development Agenda, the review would be done in 2019-20, in line with the termination year of the 14th Finance Commission. The National Development Agenda will also deal with issues related to internal security, defence and external affairs.

The Five-Year Plans first started in 1951 under the country's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In July 1951, the Planning Commission presented a draft outline of a plan of development for the period of five years, starting from April 1951.

Since then, India regularly had Five-Year Plans till the 12th one, which ends this year, except 1966-69, when the five-year Plans were replaced with annual Plans. There were no Five-Year Plans in 1979-80 and 1990 to 1992..