THE Prime Minister’s Committee on Civil Service Reforms has finalised its core recommendations, yet omitted any clear roadmap for the Planning Commission. The latter is routinely described as dysfunctional. Whether or not that description is true is beside the point. The more useful question is whether Pakistan will do what India did when its own planning body stopped delivering, or take a different course altogether.

The two commissions began as near-twins. India’s was founded in 1950, Pakistan’s in 1953, both modelled on Soviet-style central planning and staffed by trained economists. Both were extra-constitutional bodies, created by executive order. Both were nominally chaired by the head of government and run day to day by a deputy chairman. Both produced Five-Year Plans as their central output and controlled how resources moved from the centre to the provinces or states. For roughly three decades, they were the same institution representing two flags.

The split started in the late 1980s with a fork in the road that both countries reached and only one of them took. India hit its own balance-of-payments crisis in 1991. It liberalised, and it grew out of the crisis rather than falling into a cycle of dependency. Pakistan entered IMF structural adjustment in 1988 and never left. It is now on its 25th programme. That single divergence did more to determine the two institutions’ fates than anything that followed. Since 1988, IMF adjustment programmes have taken precedence over what became, in Pakistan, the largely academic exercise of five-year planning. The Commission became just another........

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