According to sources, the prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has prevailed upon the cabinet colleagues to clear the draft document without much ado as two years of the Five Year Plan period were getting over. The cabinet, it may be recalled, discussed the draft document earlier but failed to clear it because of differences over plan outlay and budgetary support between finance minister Yashwant Sinha and deputy chairman Planning Commission Jaswant Singh. Other ministers too were sore over the move to reduce Plan outlay for central ministries by Rs 21,500 crore.

In a bid to prevent the controversy from reaching a flash point, the cabinet decided to take up the matter at another meeting on Sunday. The meeting has now been pre-poned to Saturday. Though officially it was stated that members of the cabinet wanted more time to go through the voluminous document before clearing it.

The issue wasalso informally discussed after the cabinet meeting on Wednesday. The prime minister, on his part tried to make finance minister Sinha, deputy chairman Planning Commission Singh and other ministers see reason and underlined the need for clearing the draft document so that it could be placed before the National Development Council (NDC), which might be called sometime in February or March.

The problem with the Ninth Plan is that central ministries want additional allocation be made in the remaining three years to make up for shortfall in the last two fiscals. This, however, is difficult for finance ministry in view of resource crunch. The 9th Plan has not only been delayed but ran into rough weather with change in government. The Plan, which was prepared by Dandavate, on the basis of approach paper cleared by the NDC, was not acceptable to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition government because of obvious reasons. Dandavate, it might be mentioned, even released the draft of the 9th Plan for publicdebate. Unfortunately it remained a draft only. However, in order to avoid Plan holiday, the government decided not to initiate the process of Plan formulation but decided to modify it according to its own priorities.