Mumbai: Indications from the Narendra Modi government about dismantling the Planning Commission, or at least changing its present avatar, are encouraging.
But the time for talking is long over. Mr Modi’s predecessor, Dr Manmohan Singh, had been since 2009 asking questions about the relevance of the Planning Commission and the need to reorient its character to suit the requirements of present-day India.
There have been several attempts in the past to do this without success as it had become a Godzilla-type body.
This is not to disrespect or denigrate the legacy of the architect of the Planning Commission, India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. He set it up in March 1950 and inaugurated the first Five-Year Plan the following year.
India was a young democracy still finding a model for development for itself and the Planning Commission, under Nehru’s guidance, served its purpose.
It helped lay solid foundations in every sphere of the economy, from science and technology and oil exploration to education and health, which the Indian private sector later built upon. Till today it is the public sector that is stacked with an unmatched wealth of skilled people in every discipline and the private sector has been poaching merrily on this wealth.
But over the years the Planning Commission failed to either foresee the requirements of India’s rapidly expanding modern economy or, if it did see it, it was unable to do anything about it. So today you have a country that is desperately short of skilled work force in various fields and even planned targets have not been met in several crucial sectors despite allocations of billions of rupees. What’s more, there has been no accountability from the mandarins running the Planning Commission.
For instance, the commission had pointed out that it takes Rs 2 - Rs 3 to deliver services worth one rupee to the poorest of the poor, and that 48 per cent of the money meant for the public delivery system was diverted. Yet it could do nothing about it and continued to pour in money without worrying about the delivery system.
The situation today screams out for a monitoring commission. The Planning Commission can be dismantled and some of its proven, effective staff used to monitor the implementation of the programmes of various government departments and ministries; monitor the delivery system, monitor the achievement of targets, and so on.
Every panchayat in the country can be used to monitor the delivery of government schemes to the last man that Mahatma Gandhi talked of.
One hopes Prime Minister Narendra Modi will waste no time in replacing the Planning Commission with a “Monitoring Commission”.
