In the first meeting on Sunday of the National Institution for Transforming India (Niti) under the Modi sarkar the replacement body for the former Planning Commission, at which the Prime Minister addressed the assembled Chief Ministers, the government side tried to lay down the new norms, but ran up against a subtle opposition, especially from CMs of non-BJP states.
Indeed, even some BJP CMs spoke of devolution of financial powers, and pressed for more funds. We don’t quite know where all this is leading up to in the final analysis, but the first new ground rule in the era of Niti, the acronym for a body with an ungainly name that is way too general and means very little, is that it is the Union finance ministry with its current focus on market-based development that will have the final say in the matter of disbursal of funds to states.
Whether this will strengthen the notion of “cooperative and competitive federalism” (again — whatever that means) the PM has repeatedly spoken of, is anybody’s guess. But what came through at the first Niti session with the CMs was that a number of the 66 Central projects running in the states are likely to be wound up or drastically pruned. Only a few days earlier, there were indications that the plan expenditure was going to be slashed. This bodes ill for the relatively less well-off states, namely most of the country.
