Role of Plan panel should change in sync with times: Yashwant Sinha

Calling for a for a radical change in the role of the Planning Commission to suit the changing times, senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha has said the panel should hand over the fund allocation job to the finance ministry and act as a monitoring authority of the government.

Sinha, who was finance minister between 1998 and 2002 in the NDA government of A B Vajpayee, said the role of the Plan panel needs to undergo a change keeping in sync with the demands of free market economy.

“The Planning Commission should perform two functions. One is perspective planning to draw contours of development for the country for the next 50 years. This time period could be broken into 25 years each and divided into five years each.

Secondly, the panel should become the monitoring authority for the Centre, because the government of India does not really has an effective monitoring authority to take stock of schemes implemented by it,” Sinha told PTI in an interview.

He suggested that the power for Plan allocation for states should be vested with the finance ministry.

“That (Plan allocation) should be surrendered to the finance ministry. They should do it and the Planning Commission should concentrate on monitoring the programme implementation,” he said.