In the eighties, Rajiv Gandhi had described the Planning Commission members as a bunch of jokers. Dr Manmohan Singh was the then deputy chairman of the Planning Commission.Nobody had appreciated Rajiv Gandhi's comments on the Planning Commission. Neither its deputy chairman nor its members deserved such ridicule by the country's prime minister.
But subsequent developments proved that Rajiv Gandhi was not very wide off the mark. Successive regimes at the Centre reduced the Planning Commission to a dumping ground for failed and discredited politicians on the one hand and second-grade economists and economic administrators on the other.
The BJP-led coalition government has done something different, not by choice though. Its Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, could not get Jaswant Singh as his finance minister in the cabinet. The Sangh Parivar and other power forces within the BJP were opposed to Jaswant Singh becoming the finance minister. So, he made Singh the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, with the rank of a cabinet minister.
Similarly, the Sangh Parivar and the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch put tremendous pressure on the government to remove Montek Singh Ahluwalia from the post of the finance secretary.
Ahluwalia enjoyed a very good equation with Jaswant Singh ; their relationship grew thick during the securities scam days when Singh as a member of the Joint Parliamentary Committee probing the scam would see eye to eye with Ahluwalia on many issues. Ahluwalia also enjoyed the confidence of Vajpayee. So, under pressure to remove Ahluwalia from the finance ministry, Vajpayee made him a Planning Commission member and elevated his status. Ahluwalia now has the rank of a minister of state and is reasonably satisfied with his growth within the government hierarchy.
But a peculiar thing about the Planning Commission today is that compared to the usual quota of at least half-a-dozen members, it has only one member in Ahluwalia, who is now in charge of industry and infrastructure sectors. Its deputy chairman is more busy solving the government's problems with the US over the nuclear explosions and has little time for the Planning Commission. Both Singh and Ahluwalia are unlike their predecessors - they are neither a failed politician nor a second-grade economic administrator. Yet, they have been parked in offices, which have little relevance in today's decision-making process in the government.
So, what is BJP's gameplan for the Planning Commission ? Does it want to wind it up or give it a new status ? Going by what Ahaluwalia is planning to do with the concurrence of his deputy chairman, Jaswant Singh, it appears that the Planning Commission is going to shed its conventional role of haggling with the states and individual central ministries over the size of their plans. It could well leave this job to the finance ministry, which in any case decides on the plan size.
Instead, the Commission could concentrate on half-a-dozen key issues which needed to be urgently tackled and become the moving force for expediting action on them. If need be, it could even approach the Cabinet for seeking its clearance for proposals to, say, cutting the the subsidy bill or creating a strong and reliable network of regulators for key infrastructure areas.
The finance ministry has proved to be too weak to push through the desired changes. The Planning Commission is ideally suited to undertake such a task. And given the current predilections of the Singh-Ahluwalia duo and the support they enjoy from the prime minister, the Planning Commission may soon emerge as the main engine of reforms.
