Experts agree plan panel needs reinvention

Days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced scrapping of the Planning Commission, there was unanimity among experts that the panel needs to be reinvented.

Updated on: Aug 27, 2014, 10:42:06 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced scrapping of the Planning Commission, there was unanimity among experts that the panel needs to be reinvented.

In the first meeting of experts held on Tuesday, it was unanimously agreed the new body should have a statutory backing to enable implementation of its suggestions by ministries. The meeting was called on the directions of the PMO to discuss the framework of the new body to replace the planning commission.

The closed-door meeting kicked off with a background presentation on the structure of the panel and a five-point agenda that included function of the new institution, its role in allocation of resources to ministries and states, structured mechanism for interaction between the new institution and the states and central ministries.

“Everybody agreed that the panel had lost on providing expert advice as those with domain knowledge had been replaced by civil servants in the last 10 years,” said one of the participants, not willing to be quoted. He also pointed out that the experts suggested that there should be a ban on posting civil servants in the new body and instead experts should be hired from different fields.

On the key function of the panel to disburse funds to states and appraise proposals, many experts suggested that the job can be given to the finance ministry with some “checks” and “balances”.

One of them said that vesting money disbursal with the finance ministry had two distinct disadvantages. First was that the ministry would become very “powerful” and second was a possible conflict of interest as both jobs of revenue generation and disbursal would be with one arm of the government.

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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