While the Department of Agriculture and Cooperation had placed a demand of Rs 18,253 crores before the planning commission for the Ninth Plan, but was allotted only Rs 9,153.82 crores, the committee observed. The committee headed by Lok Sabha member K Yerran Naidu has said that despite the Planning Commission stressing the need for higher investment in agriculture sector in its Ninth Plan document, it has acted in diffidence to its proposal when it came to actual allocation.

"It is very disappointing to note that thePlanning Commission themselves have chosen to ignore their own observation when it came to the question of actual allocation of plan funds in favour of agriculture," the report said. The annual plan outlay for agriculture sector during 1999-2000 has been fixed at Rs 1,941 crores as against the demand of Rs 3,000 crores made by the ministry. The committee has said if the government was serious in aiming at doubling the food production in the coming 10 years to make India hunger free. The committee also said that the allocation of funds should have been much more than what it has been given. It has directed the finance ministry and the Planning Commission to take a realistic view about the quantum of plan funds required for the agri sector at least at the revised estimate stage.

The committee has also taken exception to the practice for the executive to drastically reduce allocation to various schemes approved by parliament, saying "such reductions by the Planning Commission, which is only an adjunct of themain executive without any constitutional sanction for its existence, amounts to exercise of powers, that can only be exercised by the passing of several cut motions." The committee cannot accept a position whereby the unending rigmorales of procedural drills prescribed by the bureaucracy for accord of mere administrative sanctions are sought to be used to put a spoke on the wheels of progress that should turn on the path delineated by parliament, the report said. "The committee is of the strong view that such practices are a negation of the basic principles of parliamentary democracy whereby extra-constitutional bodies, procedural devices and practices seek to undermine the supremacy of parliament over the executive," sources said.