Breaking down the question
The instruction is to critically examine — to weigh the case for and against — the relevance of development planning. The candidate must ask whether centralised planning, the cornerstone of the Nehruvian vision of social change, still matters in a liberalised, market-led economy.
Development planning here means the state-directed, Five-Year-Plan model pursued from 1951, and relevance invites a judgement across two eras: its role in the planned decades and its diminished but not extinguished place today.
The note on development planning and the mixed economy anchors the answer.
How to approach it
Establish planning as a vision of social change — Nehru's route to modernity through a mixed economy combining state and market. Then present the critique: inefficiency, bureaucratic control and the shift after 1991 to markets and indicative planning.
Conclude with a balanced verdict: the directive planning model has lost relevance, but planning as strategic coordination — for equity, welfare and public goods the market neglects — remains necessary.
Model answer
Development planning was the institutional heart of India's post-Independence vision of social change. Under Nehru, the state adopted centralised Five-Year Plans and a mixed economy, deploying public investment to build heavy industry, infrastructure and a self-reliant modern nation.
The case for its relevance. Planning built the industrial and scientific base — steel, power, irrigation and higher education — that the market alone would not have financed. It expressed a normative commitment to equity and social justice, directing resources to backward regions and disadvantaged groups. As a framework for setting national priorities and correcting market failure, it retains value.
The critical case. Critics charge that rigid, licence-bound planning bred inefficiency, bureaucratic rent-seeking and slow growth — the so-called Hindu rate of growth. The 1991 liberalisation dismantled much of the command apparatus, and the replacement of the Planning Commission by the NITI Aayog in 2015 signalled a move from directive to indicative, advisory planning within a cooperative federal structure.
A balanced assessment. Centralised, target-setting planning of the classical kind has indeed lost relevance in a market-driven economy. Yet planning as strategic guidance endures: markets do not deliver health, education, environmental protection or regional balance on their own. Amartya Sen's emphasis on social investment in capabilities shows why public planning for human development remains indispensable.
Development planning is therefore relevant not as a substitute for the market but as its corrective — a means of steering growth towards equity and sustainability that the market, left alone, will not secure.
Examiner's perspective
The typical weak answer defends planning uncritically or dismisses it wholesale, missing the critically examine demand for both sides. The examiner wants the candidate to distinguish the form of planning that has dated from the function that survives.
Strong answers frame planning within the Nehruvian vision of social change, mark the 1991 and NITI Aayog turning points, and conclude that the model has evolved from directive to indicative rather than becoming irrelevant. Invoking Sen on capabilities lifts the answer from policy narration to sociological argument within the limit.