Less is more for Plan Panel

In a major governance revamp, the Planning Commission wants the Centre to administer just 30 schemes and give money for remaining programmes directly to the state governments. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Apr 10, 2011, 23:28:10 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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In a major governance revamp, the Planning Commission wants the Centre to administer just 30 schemes and give money for remaining programmes directly to the state governments.

There are about 1,300 schemes administered by different Central government ministries and in many, the yearly allocation is less than R100 crore. The money is meager considering that India’s plan budget for the financial year 2011-12 was R4,23,00,000 crore with big schemes such as Sarva Siksha Abhiyan getting over R20,000 crore.

Several chief ministers including Nitish Kumar of Bihar have demanded that the states be allowed to use funds from the Centre as per their need. The National Development Council headed by Prime Minister has already passed a resolution to reduce a number of Central government schemes.

"It is just not possible for the district administration to run so many Central schemes. There should be less and more effective programmes," he said after a recent meeting with Plan Panel deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia.

The plan panel has framed a broad outline of the schemes that should be shelved and the framework of the 30 flagship programmes. Each flagship programme will cover an entire sector. "It would be on the lines of Bharat Nirman," an official said.

But, the plan panel is treading cautiously as the move can upset many Central government ministries as there is a huge workforce to run these small schemes. "We need to discuss the approach with all the ministries before taking a final decision," Plan Panel member secretary told HT recently.

"The problem is for each scheme the department or the ministry gets administrative funds to hire personnel. Once in, the government it is very difficult to remove anyone," an official said.

The commission believes it is not such a big problem as many existing schemes would be merged into the main flagship programmes.

The aim of the exercise is effective monitoring, which the panel believes is not possible in more than 30 schemes. As of now, only 12 flagship programmes are under the constant radar of the Centre.

The commission wants to introduce the new mechanism from the 12th five year plan starting from 2012-13 but before that it will have to cross the wall of opposition emerging from bureaucrats in the Central government ministries.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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