7 months on, Niti Aayog yet to take off as premier think-tank

The National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog that replaced the Planning Commission on the first day of this year has not taken off as the government’s premier think tank, proving to be a toothless body largely ignored by ministries.

Updated on: Aug 15, 2015, 02:06:53 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog that replaced the Planning Commission on the first day of this year has not taken off as the government’s premier think tank, proving to be a toothless body largely ignored by ministries.

A-view-of-the-Yojana-Bhawan-in-which-the-Planning-Commision-was-located-in-New-Delhi-on-Thursday-The-restructured-body-will-now-be-known-as-the-NITI-Ayog-PTI-Photo

Vice-chairman Arvind Panagariya, an academic from Columbia University, has settled down in a bureaucratic atmosphere where decision-making is dreadfully slow, though he has been trying hard.

Some of his ideas on getting the best Indian minds were negated amid rigid government rules and because the old guard at the erstwhile plan panel was unwilling to change the way things worked.

“He is a soft-spoken and mild-mannered person and sometimes that does not work with the Indian bureaucracy,” a senior government functionary commented on Panagariya’s personality.

Panagariya faced the usual roadblock for an outsider as senior officials ignored his invitations for meetings and deputed juniors, which never happened when Montek Singh Ahluwalia was Planning Commission's deputy chairman.

Panagariya’s appointment in the rank of a cabinet secretary, unlike Ahluwalia who was of cabinet minister rank, was seen as a reason behind that. It sent out a message the NITI Aayog was not an empowered body.

The government has now elevated the vice-chairman to cabinet minister rank and its members to that of minister of state.

Unlike the erstwhile panel that had eight members, Panagariya has a small team of two members -- Bibek Debroy and VK Saraswat -- and there have been no replacements for recently retired domain experts.

That may change soon as the government has accepted Panagariya's proposal to restructure the Aayog, which would mean cutting the number of existing personnel to one-third and hiring domain experts from India and abroad.

The Aayog will soon hire a chief economist and domain experts for nine sectors to be called officers on special duty.

Since the body does not have the power to disburse money to ministries and state governments as the Planning Commission did, bureaucrats cannot call the shots any more.

Silence greets one in the once bustling corridors of Yojana Bhawan. "We receive ministries’ requests for our opinion only on directions of the PM,” a senior official said.

The advice often has little or no bearing on the final policy formulation.

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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