Anmoldeep Singh & Aryan Pratap Sharma
From the Red Fort in 2014, PM Modi articulated the government’s vision to replace the Planning Commission with a new institution—NITI Aayog— to rejuvenate and strengthen the federal structure. Consequently, NITI Aayog has taken a central role in promoting cooperative and competitive federalism in the Indian republic. More than a decade later, this framing continues to shape public and scholarly discourse. With the conclusion of the 11th meeting of NITI Aayog’s Governing Council, much of mainstream media’s commentary still remains focused on its role as a federal lynchpin. Though significant, this analysis obscures an equally important function of the institution: NITI Aayog as a site of narrative construction. Viewed from this vantage point, the deliberations of the Governing Council (GC) provide an intelligible exploration of the narratives that have shaped the trajectory of India’s development. This piece traces the evolution of discourse across the eleven meetings of the Governing Council to understand the nuances of the government’s approach to policy problems.
Initially, through the GC meetings, the emphasis was on charting a “common path to prosperity” in the ‘post-planning era’ (PIB, 2015). From 2015 to 2017, the dominant narrative framed ‘capital-first economic growth’ as the primary instrument for transforming India, while states were positioned as collaborative actors in this process. Through metaphors such as ‘Team India’ and ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’, the states were called upon to work in “the spirit of cooperative, competitive federalism” (PIB, 2015; Business Standard, 2015). To realise these twin objectives, the GC identified an immediate need for states to “increase capital expenditure and infrastructure creation” (PIB, 2017). However, the issue of complex regulatory mechanisms emerged as a major structural impasse. For instance, the repeated use of terms such as “political deadlock” and “delay[ed] projects” in press releases highlights the concern related to fragmented governance and policy paralysis hindering the realisation of the stated objectives (PIB, 2015; 2015a). For addressing these issues, Chief Ministers’ were encouraged to personally review stalled projects and streamline regulatory processes (PIB, 2015).
The fourth and fifth governing council’s meeting in 2018 and 2019 marked an important shift in the government’s approach. While economic growth remained central to the vision of development, the discourse increasingly emphasised the need for equitable distribution. The development challenges were framed in the terms of lagging agricultural growth, inadequate healthcare access and rural underdevelopment (PIB, 2018). The proposed policy response, thus, aimed to foster multiple welfare schemes, including PM KISAN and soil health cards for farmers, Ayushman Bharat and Mission Indradhanush for healthcare, and aspirational districts development for rural development (PIB, 2018; 2019). Hence, welfare provisioning and social protection emerged as important components of the ‘New India by 2022’ vision (PIB, 2018; 2019). However, the COVID 19 pandemic disrupted the trajectory of this vision, necessitating a reorientation of policy priorities.
From 2020 to 2022, the government discourse has primarily revolved around ensuring macroeconomic stability and managing the recovery process in the pandemic and post-pandemic era. This was aggressively operationalised through the inward-looking industrial policy—Atmanirbhar Bharat— which seeked indigenous industrialisation by introducing multiple measures, most notably the Production Linked Incentives (PLIs) (PIB, 2021; NITI Aayog, 2021). Along with it, deliberations during the subsequent GC meetings were dominated by the need for trust-based legislations and human capital frameworks (like the New Education Policy) that lead to higher factor productivity in the economy (NITI Aayog, 2022).
Interestingly, from 2023-24, policy planning pivoted towards longer-term structural positioning, recognising that welfare-centric narrative of pre-pandemic period required a more ambitious frame. The central organising vision became the ‘Viksit Bharat @ 2047’, that imagined capital expenditure boost for broad-based growth via holistic planning frameworks like the PM Gati Shakti (NITI Aayog, 2023; PIB, 2023). Crucially, the narrative simultaneously absorbed a gender dimension that had been absent in earlier cycles. Women-led development was elevated from a welfare sub-theme to a constitutive pillar of development vision, signalling a shift from women as beneficiaries of growth to women as agents of change. This rhetorical elevation was accompanied by a renewed attention to human capital that acknowledged that demographic dividend required active policy scaffolding. Together, these narrative constructions made India’s developmental ambition inseparable from its capacity to mobilise its most underutilised human reserves.
From 2025 to 2026, the GC discourse underwent a departure from aggregated GDP-centric metrics towards a place-based model of development embedded in digital public infrastructure. The emergence of ‘Viksit Rajya’ signalled that developmental imagination had shifted from nation as a homogenous whole to the differentiated spatial fabric where Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities were recast as autonomous engines of regional prosperity. Simultaneously, the discourse incorporated a methodological turn to an inclusive human development framework as tools to hold the state accountable to distributional outcomes.
Together, the eleven meetings of the GC offer more than a chronicle of shifting policy priorities. Each narrative phase produced a layered discourse in which capital expenditure, welfare provisioning, self-sufficiency in production, and place-based inclusion co-exist within a single developmental imaginary. Understanding this is indispensable for citizens who seek not merely to follow India’s developmental trajectory, but to critically interrogate the stories through which it is told.
Anmoldeep Singh & Aryan Pratap Sharma are Research Interns at PANJ Foundation.