The 13th Five Year Plan and its challenges
- By Niranjan Sahoo
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E-mail China.org.cn, November 6, 2015
It is no surprise that NDRC enjoys a cult status among most developing world. In fact, when India scrapped its obsolete planning body last year and replaced it with NITI Aayog (National Institution for Transforming India), the new leadership under Prime Minister Narendra Modi took a considerable view of NDRC. India's new policy body has generously embraced key NDRC features such as the creation of specialized units comprised of domain experts, careerist professionals than generalists and decentralized process of collecting inputs and building feedback loop.
Tough road ahead
The 13th Five-Year Plan which seeks to make China a "moderately prosperous society by 2020" through a panoply of strategies and actions such as redirecting economic focus to services, innovation and high end manufacturing has a tough road ahead. With global economy still on a tailspin and Chinese going through its rebalance and adjustment, planners have tough tasks at hand to meet many ambitious growth targets such as "redoubling of GDP and per capita income by 2020" while simultaneously meeting challenges of environmental protection and income distribution.
What is going to be the challenge is bridging growing inequality (between rural and urban and bridging intra-rural and intra urban disparities) and ensuring higher living standards for a huge rural population. Meeting the rising aspirations of populations in rural and urban pockets who would like to have better education, healthcare, access to social security and stable income at a time when economy is experiencing downward movement would put considerable stress on public exchequers. Thus, building a moderately prosperous society by 2020 can be a stupendous task requiring serious rethinking in country's economic direction and planning mission.
Yet, those who know country's ability to transform a predominantly rural society to an industrial powerhouse in a short span and lift more than 600 million people out of poverty in matter of three decades ought to keep their faith on new milestones. To China's advantage, it has necessary financial wherewithal, technology, expertise and required leadership to walk the talk on lofty goal of creating a "beautiful China."
Niranjan Sahoo is Senior Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi
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