Give Niti Aayog time to reveal itself

Given that the resolution of the Union Cabinet setting up the National Institution for Transforming India Aayog, or the Niti Commission which was unveiled on the first day of the new year is wrapped in woolly rhetoric, it is tempting to say that this body which has been put in place after jettisoning the Planning Commission is neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring.

The best that can be said for it, as for many other initiatives of the present regime, is that we should give it time to reveal itself and the outcomes contingent on it.

The Planning Commission was set up under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1950, an era when the Indian capitalist was at best fledgling and the Indian state had to take on the burden of doing the ground work to set the country on the road to transformation from the earlier colonial framework. It is this which is being sought to be reviled as “socialistic”.

Nevertheless, while the working of the earlier plan body showed up shortcomings from time to time, it did sterling work from the ground up. It mapped the resources available in the country and pointed to the need of developing the physical and the social infrastructure in an extremely poor society by sending resources in directions in which they were needed.

In Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s conception of things, all that is old hat. He would like the role of the state only to be that of an enabler as the Niti Aayog resolution points out under the “Bharatiya” development model, whatever that expression may mean.

This is, of course, another way of saying that it is the market that will determine priorities and the allocation of resources to various sectors, and not any planning authority.

The Cabinet resolution unfurling the Niti Aayog speaks particularly of the “purchasing power” of the middle class and the neo-middle class, in effect underlining their role as no more than a large market.

“Cooperative federalism” is another aspect sought to be underlined under the Niti Aayog. The meaning of this is not entirely clear although it is indicated that planning is not to be top down but bottom up, with each state pointing to its own priorities to the Aayog, as against the “one-size-fits-all” approach that Mr Modi has attributed to the superseded model of development.

The validity of such attribution can be debated, of course. Nevertheless, the chief ministers and lieutenant-governors will sit on the general council of the Aayog and that, it is believed, will liberate states from any diktat of the Centre. Let’s wait and see.