On August 15, 2014, on the sixty-eighth anniversary of India's independence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi dismantled the Planning Commission, an institution that had existed since 1950. It was replaced with a new organization, the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog). However, unlike its predecessor, which had wielded vast powers to direct the allocation of governmental resources to various parts of India's economy on a five-year basis, the new entity would mostly serve as an in-house socioeconomic research organization for the government.
The dismantling of the Planning Commission was fraught with considerable political significance. It was a self-conscious move on the part of Modi's government to distance itself from India's historic commitment to the planning process—one that harked back to the era of the country's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Simultaneously, it also signaled an end to what remained of India's socialist proclivities—yet another Nehruvian legacy.
Since the early 1990s,...
