On the first day of the New Year, the Modi Government set up Niti Aayog or the National Institution for Transforming India replacing the Planning Commission. The Prime Minister will head the new institution, which is tasked with the role of formulating policies and direction for the Government. Its Governing Council will comprise State Chief Ministers and Lt. Governors of Union Territories.
The new institution will serve as a think-tank and provide a national agenda for the Prime Minister and the Chief Ministers.
This will include relevant strategic and technical advice on key elements of policy, economic matters of national and international importance, the official release on the Cabinet resolution setting up the Niti Aayog said.
It will also develop mechanisms for the formulation of village-level plans and aggregate these progressively at higher levels of government.
The resolution begins with a quote of Mahatma Gandhi on the law of life being constant development and goes on to state said that the institutions of governance and policy have to adapt to new challenges and they must be built on the founding principles of the Constitution of India.
The transformation of India, it states, would involve changes of two types — consequences of market forces and those that would be anticipated and planned. “The evolution and maturing of our institutions and polity also entail a diminished role for centralised planning, which itself needs to be redefined.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Chief Ministers and Governors of various States at the retreat at Race Course Road, following the meeting on Planning Commission revamp, in New Delhi on December 7, 2014. Photo: PTI
On the planning process, the resolution states that there was a need to separate the ‘process of governance’ from the ‘strategy of governance’.
Also part of the proposal is a state-of-the-art Resource Centre, a repository of research on good governance and best practices.
Unlike the Commission, the Aayog won’t have a Secretary. It will have a PM-appointed Vice-Chairperson and a Chief Executive Officer. Former Asian Development Bank Chief Economist and Columbia University Professor Arvind Panagariya is tipped to be the Aayog’s first Vice Chairperson. The Government, however, had not made a formal announcement till the time of going to press.
The Commission was set up in March, 1950 through a Cabinet Resolution, which the Modi Government scrapped in August 2014.
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