Reorient Plan panel

There is considerable speculation about when the Planning Commission will be reconstituted and who will occupy the largest room in Yojana Bhavan. There are many in the government, possibly including Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, who are of the view that the Planning Commission is some sort of an anachronistic vestige of India’s discredited socialist past and should be scrapped. However, this is unlikely to happen.

One important reason why the Planning Commission is not going to be wound up stems from the fact that this body performs certain functions that are crucial for ensuring smooth governance. If the Planning Commission did not perform these functions, some other wing of the government would have to. It may, therefore, be that much simpler for the government to not disband the Commission but reorient its role, or even drastically diminish it.

There is a view that Mr Modi, in his earlier avatar as chief minister of Gujarat, did not relish the idea of coming to Yojana Bhavan from Gandhinagar. Even if he did not come with a begging bowl in hand, he was far from happy at being peremptorily told how much his government would be given as Plan assistance and how the money was to be spent on various schemes.

The perception that the Planning Commission may be wound up gained currency when, within weeks of the new government coming to power, the Independent Evaluation Office of the Commission headed by Ajay Chhibber came out with a report which claimed: “Since the Planning Commission has defied attempts to reform it to bring it in line with the needs of a modern economy and the trend of empowering the states, it is proposed that the Planning Commission be abolished.”

Mr Chhibber argued that state governments wanted greater flexibility in spending Central funds in the way they wanted. He suggested that the Planning Commission be converted into an official think tank of sorts, as a panel of experts drawn from various fields who would deploy their wisdom to look at long-term issues, including climate change and management of coastlines.

Whether Mr Chhibber’s recommendations were made to be acted upon at some point of time in the future — or whether these would meet the fate of innumerable suggestions made by the Planning Commission in dozens of weighty tomes — is a separate story. For the record minister of state for planning rao Inderjit Singh stated that the government has no plans to scrap the Planning Commission.

Meanwhile, there is considerable speculation in the corridors of power that Arun Shourie will soon be appointed as the Commission’s deputy chairman to succeed Montek Singh Ahluwalia. It was reported on July 19 that Mr Shourie’s name would be formally declared soon and thereafter, the names of the Commission’s members (who will each hold the rank of minister of state) would be announced. Many are wondering why Mr Modi is taking such a lot of time announcing the name of Mr Shourie for the post of deputy chairman of the Planning Commission (who will hold the rank of a minister in the Union Cabinet).

Could the delay be on account of an interview given by Mr Shourie in August 2009 wherein he described the then president of the Bharatiya Janata Party and current home minister Rajnath Singh as behaving as if he was like “Alice in Blunder-land”? Mr Singh was not the only person who was not amused. Spokespersons of the BJP were quick to rebut Mr Shourie’s colourful analogy. Ravi Shankar Prasad said: “The party gave him two terms in the Rajya Sabha, made him Union Minister. This was wholly unexpected from him. When he refers to BJP as kati patang (a kite with a broken string), it hurts thousands of party cadres spread all over the country.”

Another party spokespersons Rajiv Pratap Rudy added: “His (Mr Shourie’s) nomination to the Rajya Sabha is coming to an end. I am sure he wants action against himself. He wants to become a martyr.”

It will be interesting to watch how Mr Shourie conducts himself, if and when he heads the Planning Commission. He had once described the Commission in rather uncharitable terms as a “parking lot” for political cronies and unwanted bureaucrats.

Throughout its history, members of the Planning Commission have been the target of jibes. When India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru decided to appoint his confidante P.C. Mahalanobis as member of the Planning Commission in January 1955 — the body had been constituted in March 1950 — one individual who was reportedly unhappy was the then finance minister T.T. Krishnamachari. Even as Prof. Mahalanobis was engaged in formulating the Second Five-Year Plan, the then finance minister is supposed to have remarked in private that the Prime Minister had appointed a “super finance minister”.

Many years later, in 1985, another Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi derogatorily described the members of the Planning Commission as a “bunch of jokers”. The then deputy chairman of the Commission was none other than Manmohan Singh. In his autobiography titled The Honest Always Stand Alone (Niyogi Books, 2010), former Union home secretary and member-secretary of the Planning Commission C.G. Somiah recounts how he had to spend considerable time and effort persuading Dr Singh not to put in his papers after Rajiv Gandhi’s sarcastic comments.

Like it or hate it, the Planning Commission has to play an important role in not merely allocation of resources, but in independently evaluating different Central government schemes as well as the policies and programmes of different departments of the government. It also has to coordinate the activities of ministries to ensure policy coherence. For instance, activities relating to energy and agriculture each come under the purview of at least half-a-dozen ministries.

As is stated on the Commission’s website: “From a highly centralised planning system, the Indian economy is gradually moving towards indicative planning where Planning Commission concerns itself with the building of a long-term strategic vision of the future and decide on priorities of the nation.”

Instead of being a super-Cabinet, the Planning Commission can and should define its functions as a body that assists the National Development Council headed by the Prime Minister and comprising the chief ministers of all the states in the country.

The writer is an educator and commentator