NITI Aayog

NITI Aayog
नीति आयोग
राष्ट्रीय भारत परिवर्तन संस्था

Agency overview
Formed 1 January 2015 (2015-01-01)
Preceding
Jurisdiction Government of India
Headquarters New Delhi
Agency executives
Parent agency Government Of India
Website www.niti.gov.in

The National Institution for Transforming India Aayog (Hindi: राष्ट्रीय भारत परिवर्तन संस्था; Hunterian transliteration: Rāshtriya Bhārat Parivartan Sansthā; IAST: Rāṣṭrīya Bhārat Parivartan Sansthā), or NITI Aayog (Hindi: नीति आयोग), is a Government of India policy think-tank established by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to replace the Planning Commission.

The stated aim for NITI Aayog's creation is to foster involvement and participation in the economic policy-making process by the State Governments of India. It has adopted a "bottom-up" approach in planning which is a remarkable contrast to the Planning Commission's tradition of "top-down" decision-making. One of the important mandates of NITI Aayog is to bring cooperative competitive federalism and to improve centre state relation . This is well reflected when Indian Prime Minister appointed three sub-groups of chief ministers for making recommendations in three important areas (centrally sponsored schemes, skill development and Swachh Bharat ). NITI Aayog will provide opportunities, that the previous Planning Commission structure lacked, to represent the economic interests of the State Governments and Union Territories of India.

The Prime Minister is Ex-Officio Chairperson for NITI Aayog.

The Union Government of India announced formation of NITI Aayog on 1 January 2015, and the first meeting of NITI Aayog was held on 8 February 2015. "NITI Blogs", which provide public access to articles, field reports and work in progress as well as the published opinions of NITI officials, are available to the public on the Aayog website.

NITI Aayog is a group of people with authority entrusted by the government to formulate/regulate policies in social and economic issues with experts in it.

India's Finance Minister Arun Jaitley made the following observation on the necessity of creating NITI Ayog:

"The 65-year-old Planning Commission had become a redundant organisation. It was relevant in a command economy structure, but not any longer. India is a diversified country and its states are in various phases of economic development along with their own strengths and weaknesses. In this context, a ‘one size fits all’ approach to economic planning is obsolete. It cannot make India competitive in today’s global economy." [1]

Renaming of Planning Commission

Origin and formation

(Independent Evaluation Office ) assessment report was submitted to Prime Minister Modi on May 29, three days after he was sworn in. According to Ajay Chibber, who heads the IEO, views in the report are based on the views of stakeholders and some Planning Commission members themselves. Planning Commission to be replaced by "control commission"

Members

The NITI Aayog comprises the following:

  1. Prime Minister of India as the Chairperson
  2. Governing Council comprising the Chief Ministers of all the States and Union territories with Legislatures and lieutenant governors of other Union Territories.
  3. Regional Councils will be formed to address specific issues and contingencies impacting more than one state or a region. These will be formed for a specified tenure. The Regional CouncilVUO by the Prime Minister and will be composed of the Chief Ministers of States and Lt. Governors of Union Territories in the region. These will be chaired by the Chairperson of the NITI Aayog or his nominee
  4. Experts, specialists and practitioners with relevant domain knowledge as special invitees nominated by the Prime Minister
  5. Full-time organizational framework (in addition to Prime Minister as the Chairperson) comprising
    1. Vice-Chairperson: Arvind Panagariya
    2. Members: Three (3) Full-time: economist Bibek Debroy, former DRDO chief V.K. Saraswat and Agriculture Expert Professor Ramesh Chand
    3. Part-time members: Maximum of two from leading universities research organizations and other relevant institutions in an ex-officio capacity. Part-time members will be on a rotational basis
    4. Ex Officio members: Maximum of four members of the Union Council of Ministers to be nominated by the Prime Minister
    5. Chief Executive Officer: To be appointed by the Prime Minister for a fixed tenure, in the rank of Secretary to the Government of India. Amithab Kant has been appointed as the new Chief Executive Officer.
    6. Secretariat as deemed necessary

[2]

Present Members

The various members of NITI Aayog are:

  1. Chairperson: Prime Minister of India
  2. CEO: Amitabh Kant
  3. Vice Chairperson: Arvind Panagariya
  4. Ex-Officio Members: Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley, Suresh Prabhu and Radha Mohan Singh
  5. Special Invitees: Nitin Gadkari, Smriti Zubin Irani and Thawar Chand Gehlot
  6. Full-time Members: Bibek Debroy (Economist), V. K. Saraswat (former DRDO Chief) and Ramesh Chand (Agriculture Expert)[3]
  7. Governing Council: All Chief Ministers and Lieutenant Governors of States and Union Territories

[4]

Major Highlights

1. The new National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) will act more like a think tank or forum and execute programs by taking the States along with them. This is in sharp contrast with the defunct Planning Commission which imposed five-year-plans and allocated resources while running roughshod over the requests of the various States.

2. NITI will include leaders of India's 29 states and seven union territories. But its full-time staff – a deputy chairman, Chief Executive Officer and experts – will answer directly to the Prime Minister of India, who will be chairman.

3. The opposition Congress IS mocked the launch as a cosmetic relabelling exercise – the new body's acronym-based name means 'Policy Commission' in Hindi, suggesting a less bold departure than the English version does. Several believe that is consistent with the negativism that has become the hallmark of the Congress.

4. Despite being blamed by critics for the slow growth that long plagued India, the Commission survived the market reforms of the early 1990s, riling Mr Modi with its interventions when he was Chief minister of industry and investor friendly Gujarat.

5. Mr Modi, elected by a landslide last year on a promise to revive flagging growth and create jobs, had vowed to do away with the Planning Commission that was set up in 1950 by Congressman and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

6. But his plans been derided by the Congress party, which wants to defend the Nehru legacy and describes Mr Modi's vision of "cooperative federalism" as cover for a veiled power grab.

7. India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, a socialist who admired Joseph Stalin's drive to industrialize the Soviet Union, set up and chaired the Commission to map out a development path for India's agrarian economy.

8. In 2012, the Planning Commission was pilloried for spending some Rs. 35 lakh to renovate two office toilets, and then it was lampooned for suggesting that citizens who spent Rs. 27 or more a day were not poor.

9. The commission had remained powerful over the decades because it had emerged as a sort of parallel cabinet with the Prime Minister as its head.

10. The Commission's power in allocating central funds to states and sanctioning capital spending of the central government was deeply resented by states and various government departments.

11. The NITI Aayog will also seek to put an end to slow and tardy implementation of policy, by fostering better Inter-Ministry coordination and better Centre-State coordination. It will help evolve a shared vision of national development priorities, and foster cooperative federalism, recognizing that strong states make a strong Nation.

SETU

The Government has established a mechanism to be known as SETU (Self-Employment and Talent Utilisation) under NITI Aayog. SETU will be a Techno-Financial, Incubation and Facilitation Programme to support all aspects of start-up businesses, and other self-employment activities, particularly in technology-driven areas.[5]

Criticism

The government's move to replace the Planning Commission with a new institution called 'NITI Aayog’ was criticised by opposition parties of India. The Congress sought to know whether the reform introduced by the BJP-led government was premised on any meaningful programme or if the move was simply born out of political opposition to the party that ran the Planning Commission for over 60 years. "The real issue is do you (the government) have a substantive meaningful programme to reform the Planning Commission?" Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi said. "If you (the BJP government) simply want to abolish it (the commission), because it is something which (Jawaharlal) Nehru created for this country and you don't like Nehru or simply because it was run by the Congress for 60 years and you don't like the Congress, that is pitiable".

The Communist Party of India-Marxist said a mere change in the name would not yield the desired results. "Mere changing this nomenclature, and this sort of gimmickry is not going to serve the purpose. Let us wait and see what the government is eventually planning," CPI-M leader Sitaram Yechury said.

"The Planning Commission used to plan policy. I don't know what is the government trying to do by merely changing the nomenclature from Planning Commission to Niti Ayog," said Congress spokesman Manish Tiwary.

However, Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman of BJP accused the critics of being "ignorant of facts".

"With the new set of changes, the state governments no longer need to have a begging attitude and instead take independent steps for development," said Sitharaman. With this the NDA government is fulfilling one more of its key promises of robust federalism.

"The idea to create an institution where states' leaders will be part and parcel of the collective thinking with the Centre and other stakeholders in formulating a vision for the development of the country is right on as compared with the previous structure, where a handful of people formulated the vision and then presented it to the National Development Council (NDC). This was not entirely absorbed and adopted by the latter," said former Planning Commission member Arun Maira.

In fact, a recent survey of expert opinions presented and analysed by Sharma (2015) and published in the magazine "Business World" shows that either a very clear distinction of roles of NDC, Governing Council and Inter State Council or a merger of one or two with a vibrant and functional ISC can serve the two key goals of such forums: policy development and conflict resolution.[6]

References

  1. ↑ "‘We will use every provision in the Constitution to push reforms’". OPEN Magazine.
  2. ↑ http://niti.gov.in/mgov_file/Amended-Cabinet-Resolution.pdf
  3. ↑ http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/agriculture-expert-ramesh-chand-appointed-as-niti-aayog-member-115090800685_1.html
  4. ↑ http://niti.gov.in/content/constitution.php
  5. ↑ Budget 2015: Govt sets aside Rs 1000 cr to setup (SETU) program to help incubate startups, The Economic Times, 1 March 2015
  6. ↑ "NITI s Destiny The Federal Question, Chanchal Kumar Sharma". BW Businessworld. Retrieved 2016-02-17.

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