Ramesh defends Plan panel, says it should have had more powers

Former Union Minister Jairam Ramesh, who had been associated with the erstwhile Planning Commission for eight years, today expressed hope that the panel, which was overhauled by the NDA government, had been vested with more powers.
"The difference between the Soviet approach of planning and the Planning Commission, which is the Indian approach, was that the commission was embedded in a democratic framework. There was no element of coercion.
"Today, we say that the Planning Commission had a 'Stalinist' legacy. It's far from that. In fact, I wish the commission had more powers," Ramesh said at a panel discussion on 'Economy and Development'.

"I have myself worked with the planning commission for eight years. It just didn't have the powers that its critics ascribed to it," he added.
The discussion was part of the symposium on 'Nehru and Today's India', organised by the University of Cambridge.
"Planning had a certain political context even in those times and Nehru certainly didn't originate the idea of planning. It was in 1934 that Sir M Visvesvaraya made the first plan for India.

"Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose had set up a national committee in 1938 with Meghnad Saha and, subsequently, Nehru becoming chairman of the same committee, it was from then that the idea of planning originated.

"What Nehru envisaged was that planning was an instrument of national integration. India was a mecca of economists and there was hardly any discord on the need for planning. But the the extent, degree and nature of planning was definitely debated," he said.
Taking part in the discussion, former Planning Commission member Arun Maira said that the commission, which has now been reincarnated as 'NITI Aayog', should focus on learning and not merely on resource allocation.
"NITI Aayog should be a learning institution with emphasis on the processes of planning and should not be restricted to the mere allocation of resources," he said.

Asked whether it has an edge over the erstwhile Planning Commission in this regard, Maira said, "Two-thirds of the Cabinet note pertaining to NITI Aayog talks about the process that needs to be worked upon.
"We have to focus on the creation of the processes of planning. It was the process that went worse and worse as time went on. We need appropriate processes for the 21st century," he added.