Planning Commission replacement: ‘New Body, New Soul, New Thinking’

In announcing his decision to replace the Planning Commission with a new institution, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said it would have a “new body, new soul, new thinking”. How might he accomplish this? Here are a few pointers:

* Think Outcomes, not Resources: Planning has been reduced to resource-based planning, rather than outcome-based. The new body must begin to think in terms of desired outcomes and design solutions backwards from there.

* Think Access, not Incomes: It’s time to rethink poverty alleviation. Poverty is not about income and spending, which is how the Planning Commission, borrowing from the World Bank’s $1.25 a day definition, viewed it. Poverty and its associated ills, as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen says, is about the lack of access to life’s basics. How can we ensure that every Indian has access to these?

* Think Innovation, not Allocation: There is never enough money. Innovation happens when planning begins with thinking how to achieve goals with the least amount of money and in the quickest time.

* Think Abundance, not Scarcities: Thinking based on European economic ideas from an era of scarcities—when “the life of man was nasty, brutish and short”—is oudated. Rather, this is the era of abundance. Think distributed solar power, think distributed clean water technologies, think Massive Open Online Courses and skills missions, think digital technology, telemedicine and wearables-based, prevention-biased healthcare, think brainpower. All of these are in abundance today. These must be the tools of the new institution’s thinking.

* Think Scenarios, not Budget Plans: Linear, centrally-planned trajectories are myths. Instead, the new institution must envision alternative scenarios and work to achieve the best of them. In advanced economies such as the US, organisations such as the National Intelligence Council prepare ‘Global Trends’ reports. It’s the kind of thing the ‘think-tank’ part of Modi’s new institution should be doing.

* Think Governance, not Politics: The new institution must think how to increase ‘governance time’ and decrease ‘politics time’ in the states. Its mandate must be to drag states into the era of economic and policy reforms.

* Think Future, not Playing Catch-up: There isn’t a great deal of time for India’s people to play catch up with the West. Scarce human resources have spurred advanced economies to move towards the final frontier of automation. In business and in war, these economies are moving towards self-organising, self-repairing systems and a new do-it-yourself era. India faces the danger of being left behind in this new Industrial Revolution.