Shiv Vishwanathan,
an intellectual and a social scientist, in his article on 26th
August in the prestigious newspaper The Hindu eulogised the Planning
Commission. He is sorry to see it go without any funerary lamentations for its
demise. While he may be right but the Commission had in a last few decades been
functioning with a disconnect with ground realities. It, in fact, had become
more an agency for distribution of largesse to the states than for planning for
poverty alleviation, leave alone prosperity of the country.
It was a relic of
Nehruvian Fabian socialist phase of our economy which neither made us
socialists nor capitalists. It left us eventually as a pseudo-socialist economy
that made rich richer and left the middle classes and the poor where they were
– struggling for survival in a regime of escalating prices and rising
frustrations. Strangely, the Commission did not even manage to identify the
poor. It came up from time to time with some weird figures for identifying the
urban and rural poor.
With the
Commission’s planners flying high up in the stratosphere making economic models
for development that neither enabled the country to prosper nor eliminated
widespread poverty in the sixty years of its predominance in economic planning
for the country. In 1961 our Economics professors in the National Academy
Administration would wax eloquent on how the country was poised for the
“take-off” stage. From all evidences, even after more than fifty years the
country is yet to take off, with so much poverty and pervasive malnutrition.
Twenty years later, in 1980 while plying the participants in the advanced
course in Public Administration in the Indian Institute of Public
Administration with complicated mathematical economic models, Prof. Sukhomoy
Chatterji, the then Member of the Planning Commission, was asked whether any
provision was made for “Garibi Hatao”, Indira Gandhi’s slogan that swept her to
power in 1971, in the economic model he promptly answered in the affirmative
and pointed at the addition made in it. “Garibi” persists even thirty years
after that, although millions were lifted from poverty after the economy was
freed from controls in 1991 –not by courtesy of the Commission.
That the Yojana
Bhawan will now not be the haunt of dreamers, econometrists and the unlikely
bureaucrat should be a happy augury. For sixty years the country carried on its
shoulders a mammoth monolith without much returns. Now that it is gone, it is a
good riddance, perhaps a time to celebrate.
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