After independence in 1947, Pakistan set out to plan its development early. A National Planning Board was constituted by government resolution in 1953, charged with drafting the country’s first comprehensive plan, and in 1958 it was reconstituted as the Planning Commission.
The young state, poor and institutionally bare, had certainly grasped a sound idea: that scarce resources must be organized deliberately rather than left to chances. For a while the idea worked. Through the 1960s, the commission enjoyed proximity to power and a clear mandate, and Pakistan’s growth model was studied across Asia as a template worth copying. Seven decades later, that early promise reads like a rebuke. The institution built to give the country direction has itself lost its way, and its near-total absence from today’s economic debate is the loudest verdict on its decline.
The debate it is absent from is now grimly familiar. Pakistan lurches from one IMF programme to the next, planning for stabilisation but never for transformation. Each IMF bailout buys a few quarters of breathing room and extracts a few promises of reform, and then the cycle resumes. At the federal level, development spending has become a residual from whatever is left once debt servicing and defence have taken their share. The Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP), the federal government’s principal development instrument, functions less as a strategic plan than as a parliamentary spoils system as its allocations are driven by the arithmetic of coalition-keeping rather than by any coherent national plan.
At the provincial level, the four governments now command both the resources and the constitutional authority to chart their own course, but they do so without much coordination among themselves or with the centre. The result is a federation that spends on development without a shared sense of where it is going.
It is essentially the commission’s failure to come to terms with the 18th Amendment that is central here. This amendment in 2010, with the accompanying 7th National Finance Commission Award, devolved a wide range of social and developmental subjects to the provinces and substantially raised their share of the divisible pool. This necessary democratic correction from over-centralisation was overdue for decades.
But it changed the ground beneath the Planning Commission entirely, and the commission seems to have never really adjusted. Its structure, its instruments and its habits all predate this revolution-like amendment and assume a center that can still direct provincial development. That centre no longer exists. Fifteen years on, the commission still behaves as though devolution were a temporary inconvenience rather than a turning point in the way the state had to plan and deliver development.
The examples of this failure to adapt are not hard to find. Consider the five-year plan, the commission’s signature product for half a century. The 12th plan, meant to begin in 2018, was to be the first genuinely post-devolution plan, formulated in consultation with provinces whose subjects it could no longer command. It never became the binding national plan it was billed as, because the commission lacked the authority to make four fiscally autonomous provinces own it and the federal government lacked the will to insist or capacity to convince, or both.
Consider Vision 2025, a comprehensive and well-argued blueprint that promised to lift Pakistan into the world’s top 25 economies by last year. It was a great document, but hardly integrated into the budgets and protocols of the provincial governments that were expected to deliver it.
The most basic failure of all is the absence of policy on how development is to be financed in a devolved federation. Years after the 18th Amendment, the federal government has still not produced a clear framework for PSDP financing that accounts for the provinces’ enlarged role, leaving federal and provincial schemes to duplicate and overlap one another with no central mechanism reconciling them.
The NFC Award itself, the supposed engine of fiscal federalism, has not been revised since 2010, frozen because consensus once lost has proved impossible to rebuild. The commission, which ought to be the body offering the evidence to break such deadlocks, virtually watches from the sidelines. It has become, in effect, a project-approval office, and even that narrow function is performed in the shadow of the Finance Division, which sets the size of the development budget.
The recent constitutional turbulence has made the commission’s predicament sharper still. The 27th Amendment, passed in November 2025, saw the federal government attempt, and fail against determined provincial resistance, to pull education and population planning back to the centre. The episode confirmed two things at once. The centre still nurses recentralising instincts, particularly over the social sectors most relevant to human development, and those instincts now run straight into an entrenched provincial veto.
What is to be done then? The commission’s most defensible future is not as a commanding planner of pre-18th Amendment decades but as the federation’s analytical and evidence authority on development planning. It should become the custodian of comparable cross-provincial data, the honest evaluator of what development spending actually achieves, and the convener on challenges no single province can solve alone, such as water, energy, climate adaptation and the demographic transition. This is the one role that survives 18th Amendment intact, because it commands nothing and threatens no province’s budget, yet it provides for real influence.
Turning that idea into an institution requires legislative measures, not pious intentions. The foundation is statutory footing. The Commission has never rested on a law of its own; it was created by a presidential resolution and draws its mandate from Schedule II of the Rules of Business, 1973, an executive instrument the government can amend by notification, which is why it remains a creature of the federal executive. An Act establishing its mandate, composition and independence would change that, and it should place the Commission with the Council of Common Interests rather than the PM’s Office, so that its work answers to the one forum where the centre and the four provinces sit as equals. That the Council itself struggled play its role successfully is a reason to strengthen and use it, not to bypass it.
The same law must fence off technical analysis from political direction, letting the political tier set vison and priorities while the professional tier produces data for development without political editing, and it must protect the tenure of the commission’s professional leadership so that unwelcome conclusions can be delivered without fear. Above all, it must give the commission a legislated voice in the development budget and the macroeconomic framework, because an evidence and data authority that cannot influence how money is spent, and cannot scrutinize a framework built solely around the next IMF tranche, my think well but counts for nothing.
Frankly, at the same time, none of this guarantees success. A well-designed institution can still be strangled by bad political priorities, and the trust on which cooperative federalism depends has unfortunately been thinning in Pakistan. But the alternative is the status quo, in which the begging bowl remains the country’s most dependable instrument of economic policy, and the Planning Commission its most prominent monument of wasted opportunities.
The writer is a sociologist with extensive work in social policy and development. He can be reached at: [email protected]
