I find it hard to think through the current debate on the Planning Commission (PC) outside a few things. The first is a clear centralisation of power at and within the PMO which I cannot help but be alarmed by. It’s all well and good when the decisions are those you agree with and all to easy to forget what centralisation does in the hands of, let’s please not forget so easily, a man whose IMHO has no H.
Its faults are easy to list but the PC (when it worked) did remain a space for thinking through a centre-state relationship and a development vision outside the government. It was a moment of articulation of intent with an (albeit diminishing) ability to put some weight behind it. I can’t quite bring myself to defend it because of what it refused to become in the more recent years, and the fights it refused to fight, but the need for such an autonomous voice remains. I don’t believe this new body will be anything other than a rubber stamp for a deeply authoritative PMO. In that, I am cautious of what will come. And by cautious, I mostly mean afraid.
There is a second context. Centre-state relationships have been marked by the project-mode of funding and a bulk of non-plan expenditures for a long time now. In which case, this is a non-debate. States have far more independence than this debate on the PC makes out and, in fact, the Centre has struggled (and, in most cases, rightly) to influence state-based outcomes. Let us please not also exaggerate the accusation that the PC was like a fiscal policeman – I have seen little empirical evidence of this. Yet, looked at another way, this is precisely why you need a body that is public in the sense of not being allied or owned by any of the multiple claimants on it – the “project” has broken an easy legibility of governance and centre-state relationships. This institutional move will only further make that new map difficult to read. It’s like planning land in the age of the SEZ – the exceptions govern the plans, not the other way around.
But I also know that I mourn an institution that should have played the role the PC was meant to play, than the actual life of the institution in the recent past. Therein lies the devil and the deep blue sea. I am wary of what comes, and hard-pressed to defend what has left.
So where do we stand? The productive question to ask through, if not in, this debate is actually this: in this regime, how do you intervene, resist, poke, prod and provoke? How do you push at the regime of policies being handed to us with an air of inevitability? How do you find a space where they are forced to add up to something called a “development vision” that you can agree or disagree with, challenge or advocate? It is this that haunts me. How do you challenge the Jan Dhan Yojana against the super-fast clearance of environmental disasters and rapid upheavals in FDI? How do you think through Jan Dhan by itself without clarity on the cash transfers it implicitly dreams and imagines? How do you reconcile the deliberate or untintentional convergences and divergences of the August 15th speech and the UP love jihad agenda?
It is clever, deeply clever, governance that lays elements next to each other that seem unrelated but are not. The PC was one space where the articulations were meant to come together. It too now steps aside. We’ve been presented with a new institution rather than the reform of an old one. We don’t know why. We are not told what we think the government thinks is broken in the PC so we don’t know what they’re trying to fix, what they’re trying to build. The intentions of a ruling regime become opaquer still, harder to fight. This debate cannot just be about whether we need a PC or not and in what form – it has to also be one more move in quietly moving chessboard that is building a pattern around us that we see only in the maat.
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
Not sure if this is a defence of the Planning Commission or a critique of a style of economic decision making? For many decades, the role of PC has been particularly anachronistic.
As a strange custodian of central transfers to states, its functions have been curious to say the least. Every year, we have had elected Chief Ministers having to come to Delhi to “present” their cases to a bunch of geriatric, mostly worthless some superannuated civil servants,.To what purpose no one wasnt quite sure about.
As a repository of “intellectual knowledge”, PC served up the best instances of anachronism, with their outputs in most parts being neither intellectual nor partcularly knowledgeable. We have had instead some hilarious conversations around definitions of poverty lines.
Central transfers should not be a question of “central” discretion. they should be rule based, ideally linked to outcomes as much as they are to “deficit needs”. After that, states should be left to their own devices (and electorates) to use those as they deem fit.
If anything, the bogey of “centralisation” in that scenario is a huge red herring, if the decision-making is not discretionary at all.
There is also a requirement for an intellectual repository, bipartisan in its ideological stance
in governance – the CBO in the US is a fine example. In the last few years, MR Madhavan’s PRS have done better quality work than PC, with infinitely less resources.
As a way forward, GOI should sell the PC building, which should be worth many hundreds of crores, and use the money to set up a high quality strategic think tank that becomes a policy advisory and data crunching unit for the Parliament and government.
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Somnath, I think you’d concede that I hardly paint the PC in any kind of hallowed light in this post. We can agree to disagree on the quality of their output– which actually varies drastically across sectors and commissions so it’s hard to generalise. Yes, the poverty line debate was foolish, but one doesn’t judge decades of work by moments.
My point is that, faults and all, I think the PC played a valuable institutional role in our governance framework even if it could not fulfill this role fully in practice. An intellectual repository sounds fine on paper. But the PC’s role was not just to gather empirics (PRS does that well because that it all it is meant to do) but to wield them to create a normative, political and effective developmental vision. No think-tank can replace that role and I think it is a role that is needed because it brings a set of voices (again, we disagree on their quality) that are not the government into the shaping of that developmental vision.
Now, if you are going to disband it, then there needs to be an articulation of what you imagine that new institution to be and how it will play this role – of a site that has the power to articulate a developmental vision and exercise some control over its realisation; in effect, a check on the ruling government whoever they may be. You have to say that you want this role to exist and, in fact, strengthen it to fix what was not working in the PC. This is not that move. What the PC needed was the teeth to be able to act as an institution that safe-guarded long-term planning against the cycles of elected governments particularly for sectors (like energy) that can only be planned in the medium-to-long term. It needed reform, not dismantling.
Can the new institution do this? It’s hard to tell because we aren’t being told what its intentions are. This opaqueness concerns me in and of itself (that’s another discussion) but it also combines with a language of an impartial, empirical think-tank that will give us this imagined dream of empirically-sound, apolitical, technically correct policy making. That language cannot create what was meant to be a constitutional safeguard – it can only create a rubber stamp.
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Gautam,
Your defence of the PC is predicated in one sentence
“to wield them to create a normative, political and effective developmental vision.”
To me, this is dangerous stuff, and maybe the reason it has been such a spectacular failure. A “normative, political and effective developmental vision” is the job of elected representatives, not of geriatric, mediocre bureaucrats. Maybe PC took its inspirations of GosPlan a little too seriously! The biggest visible eyesore has been the spectacle of Chief Ministers, elected (sometimes multiple times) with large majorities having to pay regular visits to the PC office and plead for more central funds. I mean, seriously?
As far as long term planning goes, like in energy, PC neither created the bandwidth nor the intellectual credibility to do so. Lets examine. Framing India’s energy security strategy comprise of a complex web of political, financial and military variables that need to be conjured together into a viable strategy, and more importantly actionable steps. So should India bid for projects in Mozambique? Or in Congo? Is there merit in negotiating a separate “long term” deal with Iraqi Kurdistan? Does that mean the possibility of stationing Indian troops there to secure those supplies? Do we need to offer Saudi Arabia “protection” against ISIS in return for an oil supply deal? The current PC has no capacity to efectively opine on any of the above.
As a start, how many foreign policy analysts does PC have? How many intelligence analysts? How many Africa experts? And indeed, how many bankers in its ranks?
If we did have an iota of such prospective planning (“divorced from electoral cycles”), we wouldnt have the serial disasters on oil asset acquisitions that we have had. And we certainly wouldnt have allowed a random Oil Minister to waste so much political energy on the IPI chimera.
Sometimes, destruction is the start of a new creation. The closure of PC would give us the flexibility to think about a completely new structure of a public think tank that allows us to do what you say, long term planning. Capacitised with real policy wonks and practitioners and with a mandate to do precisely that, and not make elected CMs cool their heels in the conference rooms of Yojana Bhavan.
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Somnath, I don’t think that the developmental vision should fall only into the hands either of an autonomous body like the planning commission or just the elected representatives. I wish the latter would inspire more faith in such a process but they haven’t for a long time. At any rate, I don’t think one precludes the other. The question is what kind of relationship do they and should they have with each other. That’s at the crux of the issue for me.
Again, I’m arguing again for the role the PC was intended to play – one of a strong, knowledge-based voice that stood in some autonomy to the elected government that therefore acted as a balance. I’m doing so not to excuse their short-comings but precisely to think about a moment of change can give us. If a new institution comes up, I want to judge it by this role not by a comparison to the PC.
Questioning the PC’s capacity will lead us nowhere since we can’t share an agreed standard to measure them by. I can guarantee you the names that come for the new think-tank will be just as inadequate because the question is not one of comprehensive capacity — no such body can be exhaustive in capacity for what they must cover. What we need to ask is if they have the ability to ask the right questions and to ask them of the right people who do have that capacity. I don’t think capacity was the issue for much of the PC’s history (with some exceptions).
You say that destruction can be the start of a new creation – I agree, but where we differ is that I don’t believe there is constructive intention here. I also don’t think that a public think-tank that is not located in a constitutional or public vision can play the most important part of its role, which is to sometimes protect us precisely from those we elect if they fail in their duties. This is one thing the PC got wrong – to see themselves as a merely technical and empirical body.
You and I disagree in our diagnoses of the symptoms – the question is: what does this government think is broken, and therefore what will it propose as a solution? As long as that is held so opaquely, I don’t see how we can think of this new body as anything but a citational index for minds already made up. The one thing I will not do is read this outside a broader framework of governance centralisation (and I mean in the PMO, not in the central treasury) and opaqueness which makes this impossible to see as a benign moment of institutional change.
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Gautam,
If the issue is primarily with the “intent” of the current regime around PC, then it’s a different discussion. And perhaps one more around ideology than the merits of PC and it’s existence.
My deep level of scepticism about PC comes from its sheer inability to influence, or even articulate any of the broad mega trends affecting India.
Is there a single analytical study by PC anytime in the ’60s and ’70s that brought out the export driven model tried by rest of Asia ?
Is there a single critique by PC of Rajiv gandhi’s idiotic move towards freeing up imports and proceeding with foreign commercial borrowing without bringing the faintest structural reform in place?
Is there any half decent study by PC on how India can secure its energy security in the 21st century?
All it did was to become are keepers to central grants.
If we think with a blank slate, possibilities abound. Examples of the CBO and National Sexurity Council in the US provide good pointers. US and the west also have the luxury of large institutional think tanks like Brookings that preserve the “idea of US” through the sheet don’t of intellectual credibility. India doesn’t. The new structure can be an amalgam of all of these.
In my view, it should be a publicly funded think tank with the mandate to frame the broad strategic contours of India’s development. Staffed by a multi disciplinary team sources from the academia, private sector and domain verticals. And certainly, specifically exclude babus of all colour.
One cannot do that with the current PC.
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Seems your only intention is to oppose any decision by the government being run by the party you detest…
Planing Commission was a relic of the Nehruvian era (yes I know you love that guy but he was a failure)… Modi has not been too radical or bold as expected to begin with… but this one good thing he has done…
and while you consistently whine about decentralization and federalism…. have you wondered what those corrupt leaders in states like Bihar, UP or Assam will do with even more power and money?
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