Prime Minister Narendra Modi has declared that the Planning Commission will be disbanded in its present form and a think tank will be created instead. The Commission was set up in the ’50s by Nehru to give direction to developmental activities. Its purpose was to ensure that policies implemented by different ministries should not work at cross purposes. The power ministry, for example, wants to cut the forests for generation of electricity, while the environment and forests ministry does not want to cut them down for conservation of biodiversity. The Planning Commission was expected to synchronise such policies. It has been generally successful in doing this, as seen by the strides the country has made since Independence. Indeed, it may have exceeded its brief by exercising undue influence on the allocation of funds to the state governments. But this should not be read as failure; rather it may be a product of overreach fostered by personal equations that the likes of Montek Singh Ahluwalia enjoyed with Manmohan Singh. The Commission has become progressively cut off from the people and deeply connected with invisible bureaucratic and corporate interests. The world, however, is moving in the opposite direction.
At the annual Central Economic Conference in 2012, Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee as he was then, demanded establishing decision-making consulting mechanisms and developing think tanks capable of assisting decision-makers and researching topics before practical needs emerge. Looking backwards, this demand for increased consultation is a new stage in development of governance. In 1750, only England and the Netherlands had placed limits on the powers of the king. All the other rulers of Europe, the Muslim Empires, and China had absolute power. The situation changed dramatically with the coming of the Industrial Revolution. Economic changes raised the standard of living and education of the masses. People began to question the assumptions of absolute governments. The new idea was that people could figure things out and they could come up with better decisions.
Today we are on another plane, flying on the development of Information and Communication technologies. People can now download and read government policy documents and they have the mind and the energy to respond to it. They want to be heard and their concerns and ideas to be taken on board. It is here that our Planning Commission has miserably failed. Scrapping the Commission and establishing a think tank will not serve any purpose. The think tank is likely to remain isolated from the people. The Energy Research Institute (TERI) is one of the Indian think tanks mentioned in the top 100 non-US think tanks worldwide. Yet it is happy to misstate facts when project money is involved. TERI assessed that people were willing to pay about Rs 7 per unit of electricity. Later, the National Hydro Power Corporation gave a contract to TERI to evaluate the costs and benefits of two hydropower projects. TERI now concluded that the benefits of electricity were Rs 100 per unit. The benefits were increased from Rs 7 to Rs 100 when prompted by a hydropower company. This is the sad state of our globally-ranked, ‘independent’ think tanks. One can only imagine the state of a government one.
The fundamental problem is that the government is being run by a combine of foreign-, business- and bureaucratic interests. They have no interest or concern for the people. The need is to change this mindset of the bureaucrats, in particular. A robust system of public participation in all facets of the government has to be put in place. I have two suggestions. One, a department of social audit must be established. This department would appoint a committee consisting of elected representatives, independent professionals, NGOs, and public representatives to make a social audit of all government departments. The promotions of the concerned official and fund allocations for ensuing years would be made contingent on this audit report. Indeed, many of these committees will be co-opted and sign on the dotted line. But there will be others that will resist and give the correct picture. The second suggestion is that the government should enact a ‘Right to Reply’ Act along the lines of Right to Information Act. It should be made obligatory for government officials to give a reasoned response to suggestions given by the public. It should be obligatory for the executive engineer, for example, to give reasons for rejecting a suggestion like increasing the capacity of a transformer. Merely changing names will not do. The country wants deeper and tangible changes in the way the government is run.
The author was formerly Professor of Economics, IIM Bengaluru.
Bharat Jhunjhunwala
