Panel doubts need for planning ministry, questions NITI Aayog

Parliamentarians have been left scratching their head on what purpose the NITI Aayog or the minister of planning serve in governance of the country.

On Friday, a standing committee of Parliament gave strikingly different views on the NITI Aayog and its predecessor, the ministry of planning.

The panel on the ministry of planning headed by M Veerappa Moily recommended to the government to dissolve the ministry and make the newly created NITI Aayog an independent body. It said the ministry was left without any significant function or mandate.

The report questioned the need for NITI Aayog, when it would perform the same allocative function as its predecessor, the Planning Commission.

“It is not clear why the Planning Commission was dismantled in the first place,” the committee said.

The committee said the Aadhar scheme, at present under this ministry, should be moved to the home ministry to enable better convergence between unique identification authority (UID) and the national population register (NPR).

“The committee would like to reiterate its concern regarding similarity in the UIDAI scheme and NPR which may be dispelled completely as there are various unresolved issues with both of them,” the panel said.

At present, under the NPR project, the home ministry will issue the national multipurpose identification card to the entire population besides enrolling people and collecting their biometrics details.

The UIDAI is also enrolling and collecting biometrics data of the residents in 24 states/union territories. It would generate Aadhaar numbers for entire population using the NPR data.

Similarly the NPR will issue the identity cards bearing Aadhaar numbers using data collected by it and UIDAI.

It said that another attached of the former Planning Commission that is the National Rainfed Area Authority (NRAA) should be moved to the ministry of statistics and programme implementation instead of shelving it altogether. The National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog) was created by the government on January 1 with a Cabinet resolution to replace the erstwhile Planning Commission.

However, the Ministry of Planning continues to exist and is playing the role of an interface between NITI Aayog and the Parliament.

The panel observed that out of the total Plan expenditure of Rs 2,114.52 crore of the Ministry of Planning for the current fiscal, a major chunk of Rs 2,000 crore has been made available to UIDAI.