Amid Niti Aayog drift, data diligence begs attention
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Economists seek Niti Aayog to fix data void
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, May 27: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is chairing the meeting of the Governing Council of the Niti Aayog at the cultural centre of the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The meeting has hogged headlines for four chief ministers skipping the da-long deliberations.
The chief ministers of Himachal Prdaesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, and Karntaka – Sukhwinder Singh Sukhu, Revanth Reddy, MK Stalin, and Siddaramaih – are boycotting the Governing Council meeting of the Niti Aayog.
Kerala is being represented by the state finance minister in the meeting. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is also not attending the meeting, as he continues to be in the Tihar Jail.
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The Governing Council is the only official forum for the Centre and the states to share stage. The agenda is, however, decided by the Centre and the states are said to have least say in deciding the matters for discussions.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has said that the Niti Aayog is irrelevant, and the Planning Commission should be revived. She stressed that the Niti Aayog has zero financial power.
Former vice chairman of the Niti Aayog, Rajiv Kumar, has said that the think tank should work with other agencies of the government to provide a regularly updated data on employment, while calling for acceptance of the private CMIE’s assessment on unemployment.
The Niti Aayog is Centre’s principal carrier of the idea of ‘co-operative federalism’. The Niti Aayog has a herculean task to fill the roles done in the past by the Planning Commission, the National Development Council, and other entities.
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The incumbent Niti Aayog vice chairman, Suman Bery, is not known to have met a chief minister for a long time. His last meeting was with the Telangana chief minister, Revanth Reddy, six months ago. Reddy is skipping the Saturday meeting of the Governing Council.
While the Niti Aayog’s planning mandate has almost been forgotten for little outcome, the think tank’s role to nudge the states to adopt key reforms in land and agriculture yielded almost zero outcomes in the last nine years. The model land leasing bill and agrarian marketing reforms were two principal state-specific outreach of the Niti Aayog in the last nine years.
The two significant sub-panels were constituted by the past Governing Council meetings. They dealt with the convergence of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) with agriculture and the digitisation of the economy.
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The first, headed by then Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, remains a non-starter. The N Chandrababu Naidu-headed panel on digitisation of the economy got a windfall gain from the Covid-19 pandemic, as the people rushed to adopt digitisation on their own after banking disruptions.
In the last two meetings of the Governing Council, Prime Minister Narendra Modi pitchforked his agenda against freebies with states in the backdrop of the growing indebtedness of the states revealed by the report of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
By the time the state Assembly elections were held in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, and Telangana, the Centre’s agenda against freebies was also forgotten. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) became aware that it had no stock of white paint to colour the dark side of the economy.
The Union Budget, unveiled by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday, expanded the basket of freebies to extend subsidies in excess of ₹one lakh crore to find jobs and internships for the youth.
The least that the Niti Aayog can do is now to restore the sanctity of data. “The least that is said is better for the Niti Aayog,” said economist Amit Bhaduri.
He stated that “under the watch of the Niti Aayog, anything can be said about anything, as there is no credibility of data”. “We are now without time series of data,” added Bhaduri.
Bhaduri’s lamentations found acceptance in the words of the former vice-chairman of the Niti Aayog. “The employment data should be made available and they also be regularly updated,” said Kumar.
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