With just 300 staffers, Niti Aayog leaner than Planning Commission

The National Institutional for Transforming India (Niti) Aayog will be a lean body unlike its predecessor, the Planning Commission, which had over 1,100 employees.

Updated on: Mar 27, 2015, 24:33:31 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The National Institutional for Transforming India (Niti) Aayog will be a lean body unlike its predecessor, the Planning Commission, which had over 1,100 employees.

The Niti Aayog that replaced the plan panel on January 1, 2015, would have about 300 people including the members and the support staff, government sources said.

This would be less than one-third of the total strength of the Planning Commission.

In the new structure the government plans to have a large number of domain experts, scientists and researchers in Niti Aayog for making it a true “think tank” of the government. And, therefore a large number of bureaucrats who got posted in the plan panel in the last decade or so will be eased out.

“There would be just six advisors in Niti Aayog much less than the number the panel used to have in the past,” a senior government official said. And they would be administrative in-charge of the different wings of Niti Aayog.

The Aayog will have primarily three wings — research, consultancy and Team India for strengthening cooperative federalism.

The research wing will develop in-house sectoral expertise as a dedicated think tank of top notch domain experts, specialists and scholars. The consultancy wing will comprise panels of experts and will look at funding for central and state governments.

Team India will have representatives from states and every central ministry and will serve as a permanent platform for national collaboration.

“The wing will create an institutional communication channel for all development related issues between the states and the Centre,” an official said.

In addition, the Aayog will have project appraisal division whereas the state plan division will be disbanded. The officials also said that a large number of secretariat staff will be transferred to different ministries as the Niti Aayog would work on a small number of such personnel.

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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