NITI TAKES OVER PLANNING (17/01/2015)

As a regular commuter on the Sansad Marg (Parliament Street), on way to office, a new board greeted me on 1^st January 2015: NITI Aayog, written on the same board which till yesterday had “Planning Commission” written on it. Welcome to an era of definite shift from the previous regime- of negating the legacy of the previous regime. NITI Aayog- which is acronym for National Institutions for Transformation of India takes over the erstwhile Planning Commission. The Hindi version of the commission’s name though, is spelt NEETI Aayog (नीति आयोग) implying Policy Commission. A more apt translation would have been something like “Rashtriya Bharat Parivartan Sansthan” or “Bharat Rashtra Parivartan Sansthan”. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. Planning Commission or Policy Commission- it is more important that every penny of government welfare reaches the actual beneficiary. The Direct Benefit Scheme (DBT) was introduced by the previous regime to check leakages. The ‘jan-dhan yojana’ of the present regime is a step further in the same direction as it aims to transfer benefit directly in beneficiary’s account through the ambitious Plan Funds Management Scheme (PFMS). The effort of the government of the day has always been to improve the delivery system. We have certainly moved ahead from the days of “trickledown theory”, when only 15 paise of a rupee reached the actual beneficiary and an authority as high as the Prime Minister of the nation had to lament and express his helplessness at the sordid state of affairs.  However, there still is ample scope for improvement. Mahatma had once said and I quote: “there is enough on this earth for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.” This greed is the root cause for growth of corruption in post independent India and this has widened the divide between the poor and the rich. The bottom-line is- will the present regime be able to bridge this divide between the rich and the poor and come up to the expectation of the Mahatma when the nation celebrates 150^th birth anniversary of this noble soul in 2019- the year of another parliamentary elections. If this is achieved, change in name of an institution or demise of an institution is of no consequence.