NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi never had a high opinion of the Planning Commission, an institutional vestige of the country’s attempts to mimic the Soviet command economy during the infancy of its Independence more than half a century ago.
As leader of the industrial powerhouse Gujarat, he stunned buttoned-down members of the commission last year by turning up at a meeting with a video that accused them of high-handedness and hobbling states with one-size-fits-all policies.
Now, as Prime Minister of the country, he looks set to clip the central agency’s wings, or perhaps abandon it altogether.
It is the starkest symbol yet of Modi’s determination to junk the Fabian socialist-leaning economic policies set in train by the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru.
In a signal that the end could be nigh for what has remained a sacred cow of policymaking despite many years of market-oriented economic reforms that began in the 1990s, a government-backed report last week suggested dismantling the Planning Commission and replacing it with a think tank.
“Since the Planning Commission has defied attempts to reform it to bring it in line with the needs of a modern economy and the trend of empowering the states, it is proposed that the Planning Commission be abolished,” the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) said in a report.
A month into his premiership, Modi has already sidelined the body whose tome-like five-year plans are always laboriously crafted but rarely adhered to.
He has left the post of executive head of the commission vacant, and he has taken away its authority to determine the central government’s capital expenditure, passing that to the finance ministry.
And, for the first time, the commission has been excluded from discussions to frame the Union Budget, which is due to be presented on July 10.
A Planning Commission spokesman declined to comment.
A “parking lot” for cronies
The IEO’s proposal is likely to amplify voices, many of them in BJP, that have questioned the relevance today of an agency created in 1950 to optimize scarce resources in a newly-born nation.
Arun Shourie, an influential BJP member, derides the Planning Commission set in a hulking New Delhi building with 500-600 employees as a “parking lot” for political cronies and unwanted bureaucrats.
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