‘Rogue’ Planning Commission unit choked of funds

The Independent Evaluation Office (IEO), which recommended the scrapping of its parent body, the Planning Commission, has found that its funding is being quietly choked.

Updated on: Aug 24, 2014, 08:45:00 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Independent Evaluation Office (IEO), which recommended the scrapping of its parent body, the Planning Commission, has found that its funding is being quietly choked.

The IEO is an attached office of the Commission and receives money from it for conducting evaluation studies on different programmes of the government.

On June 23, the IEO bit the hand that fed it: It made a report to the prime minister’s office (PMO) recommending the dissolution of the Commission on the grounds that the panel has defied attempts to reform it and has exceeded the brief stipulated in the cabinet resolution of 1950 that set it up.

The IEO also recommended that a new body called Reforms and Solutions Commission should be set up in place of the panel and its funds disbursement job should be given to the finance ministry and finance commission.

Read: Scrapping Planning Commission will not harm state's interest: BJP

Predictably, these recommendations have gone down badly with the Commission: speaking to HT, a senior official at the plan panel called into question the IEO’s right to evaluate its parent body.

An IEO official said flow of funds from the panel has dried up in the past couple of months and it has hit their evaluation studies. “The institutions (assigned studies) are asking for money to take forward the studies being done by us. But, the Planning Commission has been extremely slow in releasing the funds,” he said.

So much so that the IEO has not been able to release first instalment to these institutions, which started work on evaluation studies in five sectors from April 2014.

Read: Plan panel veterans to deliberate on its replacement on Aug 26

The IEO is conducting studies on schemes such as Public Distribution System, MGNREGA and Rajiv Gandhi Gramin Vidyutikaran Yojana.

IEO’s director general Ajay Chhibber acknowledged that the pace of fund flow from the panel was slow but added that it could be because of normal bureaucratic delays.

The Commission’s financial advisor P K Pujari said that the panel had accepted IEO’s projection of Rs 15.50 crore expenses for 2014-15 in full, and this had been approved by Parliament. Out of that amount, the IEO had spent about a fifth, or Rs 3.15 crore, by the end of July, he said.

Read: 1,000-odd Planning Commission staff at sea

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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