NITI Aayog in the context of "Five-Year Plans of India"

The National Capital Region (NCR; Rāṣṭrīya Rājadhānī Kṣetra) is a region centred on the city of Delhi, a special union territory of India that hosts the country's capital city New Delhi. It encompasses the entirety of Delhi and a number of adjacent districts from the states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan. The NCR and the associated National Capital Region Planning Board (NCRPB) were created in 1985 to plan the development of the region and to evolve "harmonized policies for the control of land-uses and development of infrastructure" in the region. Prominent cities of the NCR are Delhi, New Delhi, Faridabad, Gurgaon, Noida, Ghaziabad and Meerut.

The NCR is a mixed, rural-urban region, with a population of over 46,069,000 and an urbanisation of 62.6 percent. There are also areas like the Aravalli ridge, forests, wildlife and bird sanctuaries. The Delhi Extended Urban Agglomeration, the inner part of the NCR, had an estimated GDP of $370 billion (measured in terms of GDP PPP) in 2015–16. Despite being a part of the NCR, the Government of India's think tank, NITI Aayog, listed the Nuh district of Haryana as the most underdeveloped across India's 739 districts.

The Planning Commission was an institution in the Government of India which formulated India's Five-Year Plans, among other functions.

In his first Independence Day speech in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced his intention to dissolve the Planning Commission. It has since been replaced by a new institution named NITI Aayog.