The Role of the Planning Commission in Advancing Women’s Development in India

When India became independent in 1947, the country faced an enormous challenge: how to lift millions out of poverty while building a modern, equitable society. The answer came in the form of an institution that would shape the nation’s economic destiny for over six decades – the Planning Commission. But beyond steel plants and dams, this body also became one of the earliest channels through which the state attempted to address the status of women. Tracing its journey, from its formation in 1950 to its replacement by NITI Aayog, reveals how policy thinking around women evolved from charity to empowerment.

The birth of the Planning Commission 🔗

The Planning Commission was set up by a resolution of the Government of India on 15 March 1950, with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as its ex-officio Chairman. It was neither a constitutional nor a statutory body – it functioned as an advisory institution created by an executive order, drawing its legitimacy from Article 39 of the Directive Principles of State Policy.

Its stated purpose was practical and ambitious: to promote a rapid rise in the standard of living by efficiently using the country’s resources, increasing production, and creating employment opportunities for all. The Commission was charged with assessing the country’s material, capital and human resources, formulating plans for their balanced use, and determining priorities for development.

The Five-Year Plan framework 🔗

The instrument the Commission used to convert vision into action was the Five-Year Plan. Borrowed in spirit from the Soviet model but adapted to a mixed economy, the First Five-Year Plan was launched in 1951 with an emphasis on agriculture, irrigation, and rural reconstruction. Successive plans turned to heavy industry, poverty alleviation, modernisation, and eventually liberalisation. Across this long arc, the Commission’s authority over central allocations gave it tremendous influence over what got built, who got jobs, and which social groups received policy attention.

Why women needed a place in planning 🔗

At Independence, women’s literacy was below 9 percent, maternal mortality was high, and most women worked invisibly in farms and homes without recognition or wages. The Constitution had already laid a strong normative foundation. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law, Article 15 prohibits discrimination on the grounds of sex and explicitly allows the State to make special provisions for women, and Article 16 ensures equality of opportunity in public employment. Article 39 further directs the State to secure equal pay for equal work and to protect the health and strength of workers, including women.

These constitutional commitments needed an operational arm. The Planning Commission, by deciding how money would flow into health, education, employment, and welfare, effectively became the vehicle through which the State translated gender equality from paper into programmes.

From welfare to development to empowerment 🔗

The way the Planning Commission treated women shifted dramatically across the decades. Scholars often summarise this evolution in three phases – welfare, development, and empowerment – each marking a deeper recognition of women as actors rather than recipients.

The welfare phase (1951-1974) 🔗

In the First Five-Year Plan (1951-56), the development of women was treated as a subject of “welfare” and was clubbed together with the welfare of vulnerable groups like Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, the destitute, the disabled, and the aged. The Central Social Welfare Board was set up in 1953 to channel grants to voluntary organisations running programmes for women and children.

The Second through the Fifth Plans largely continued this welfare orientation. Programmes focused on maternal and child health, nutrition, condensed courses of education for adult women, and training in tailoring or handicrafts. The implicit assumption was that women were passive beneficiaries who needed care and protection rather than economic agency.

The development phase (1974-1992) 🔗

The publication of the landmark report Towards Equality by the Committee on the Status of Women in India in 1974 forced a rethink. The Fifth Plan (1974-79) began acknowledging that welfare alone could not change women’s status; welfare had to be integrated with development services, and women needed training that linked them to income.

The real break came with the Sixth Plan (1980-85). For the first time, a separate chapter on “Women and Development” appeared, recognising women as active partners in development rather than passive subjects of welfare. The plan emphasised improving women’s access to assets, joint titles to land, and credit, and led to the formation of the National Committee on Women. The Seventh Plan (1985-90) continued in this direction, focusing on bringing women into the economic mainstream through training, employment, and self-help.

The empowerment phase (1992 onwards) 🔗

The Eighth Plan (1992-97) and especially the Ninth Plan (1997-2002) reframed the conversation again. The Ninth Plan formally adopted the term “Empowerment of Women”, treating women as a separate target group and as agents of social change. Two critical instruments emerged in this period.

The first was the Women’s Component Plan, which required that at least 30 percent of funds and benefits in women-related sectors flow directly to women. The second was gender budgeting, formally introduced in the Union Budget of 2005-06, which required ministries to identify and report allocations meant for women.

The Tenth Plan (2002-07) made the empowerment of women one of its primary objectives, and the National Policy for the Empowerment of Women (2001) provided a comprehensive framework covering economic, political, social and legal dimensions. The Eleventh Plan (2007-12) went further by adopting a rights-based approach, and the Twelfth Plan (2012-17) framed inclusive growth such that women’s empowerment was treated as central to economic progress.

Key women-focused programmes that emerged from planned development 🔗

Several flagship programmes that millions of women rely on today were either born or scaled up within the Planning Commission’s framework.

Rural employment and self-employment 🔗

Schemes like the Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP), the Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWCRA), and later the Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana included specific provisions for women. The biggest leap came with the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), legislated in 2005, which mandates that at least one-third of beneficiaries be women and guarantees equal wages.

Health and nutrition 🔗

The Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), launched in 1975, became one of the world’s largest programmes for early childhood and maternal nutrition. The National Rural Health Mission (2005) further strengthened reproductive and maternal health services, with Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) – almost all women – becoming the backbone of village-level health delivery.

Self-help groups and microfinance 🔗

The SHG-Bank Linkage Programme, initiated by NABARD in the early 1990s and supported through successive plans, transformed financial inclusion. Today, the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana – National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM) builds on this legacy.

The transition to NITI Aayog 🔗

By the early 2010s, criticism of the Planning Commission had grown. Critics argued that its top-down, “one-size-fits-all” approach did not fit a federal economy in which states had widely different needs. On 1 January 2015, the Commission was replaced by the National Institution for Transforming India, or NITI Aayog.

The change was philosophical as much as administrative. NITI Aayog functions as a policy think tank rather than a fund allocator. It promotes cooperative federalism, encourages bottom-up planning with state participation, and focuses on outcomes rather than fixed multi-year plans.

Continuity in women’s development 🔗

The shift did not interrupt the State’s commitment to women’s development; it reframed it. NITI Aayog’s Women and Child Development Division designs strategic policy frameworks for gender empowerment and nutritional outcomes, evaluates ongoing schemes, and partners with the Ministry of Women and Child Development.

A major anchor for this work is the Sustainable Development Goals framework, particularly SDG 5 on gender equality. NITI Aayog’s SDG India Index tracks state-level progress on indicators like sex ratio at birth, female labour force participation, and women’s representation in decision-making. Recent data shows the female-to-male labour force participation ratio improved from 0.33 in 2018-19 to 0.48 in 2022-23, an encouraging but still inadequate shift.

In 2026, NITI Aayog launched State and District reports on SDG 5 in collaboration with IIM Ahmedabad and the Gates Foundation to drive district-level action on gender equality. The focus areas – gender-disaggregated data systems, gender-responsive budgeting, financial inclusion, the care economy, and behavioural interventions – reflect a much more granular approach than Five-Year Plans ever managed.

What changed, what remained 🔗

Comparing the two institutions reveals a useful pattern. The Planning Commission set up the architecture: it created the chapters, the schemes, the budgets, and the very vocabulary of women’s development in policy. NITI Aayog now works on sharpening that architecture with data, evaluation, and state-level tailoring.

Yet challenges persist. Female labour force participation, though improving, remains low for an economy of India’s size. Spousal violence, unpaid care work, and the gender pay gap continue to depress women’s economic potential. According to a DMEO analysis, only 41 percent of women aged 15-49 have completed ten or more years of schooling, compared to 50.2 percent of men, and roughly 29.3 percent of married women aged 18-49 reported spousal violence in NFHS-5. Empowerment, as the report notes, remains a journey in progress.

Why this history matters 🔗

Understanding the Planning Commission’s role in advancing women’s development matters for two reasons. First, it shows how institutions shape outcomes. The shift from clubbing women with the “destitute” to treating them as agents of change did not happen because society suddenly became enlightened; it happened because committees, researchers, and planners deliberately rewrote the chapters. Second, it reminds us that policy frameworks are never neutral. The categories planners use – welfare, development, empowerment – decide which problems get budgeted, which schemes get funded, and ultimately, whose lives change.

The Planning Commission’s legacy in women’s development is therefore not just a chapter in economic history. It is the scaffolding on which today’s gender-responsive policies stand, even as NITI Aayog reshapes how that scaffolding is used.

What do you think? Does shifting the language from “welfare” to “empowerment” genuinely change women’s lives on the ground, or do the underlying social structures need to change first for policy labels to matter? And in a federal system where states differ widely, should women’s development priorities be set centrally, or should each state design its own roadmap?

References

1. https://www.insightsonindia.com/indian-economy-3/planning-in-india/genesis-of-planning-commission-and-its-objectives/
2. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/aep04/chapter/role-of-planning-commission/
3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332780543_Women_Empowerment_in_the_Five_Year_Plans_of_India
4. https://ijcrt.org/papers/IJCRT2003356.pdf
5. https://www.ijfmr.com/papers/2023/4/4972.pdf
6. https://edukemy.com/blog/approach-for-women-development-since-independence-upsc-indian-society-notes/
7. https://www.niti.gov.in/
8. https://niti.gov.in/divisions/division/women-and-child-development
9. https://www.niti.gov.in/competitive-federalism/sdg/Goal-5-Achieve-gender-equality-and-empower-all-women-and-girls
10. https://www.thehansindia.com/amp/business/niti-aayog-launches-sdg-5-state-and-district-reports-to-drive-economic-empowerment-of-women-1073605
11. https://dmeo.gov.in/article/portrait-womens-empowerment-india