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Journalism of Courage
While it’s early days yet, India’s Central Economic Reforms Commission may just about be getting created. Once the Cabinet approves the Tenth Five Year Plan (in the last week of October) and the National Development Committee clears in by the end of next month, the Planning Commission proposes to set up a steering group which will monitor the implementation of economic reforms proposed in the Plan document.
The monitoring will take place ministry-wise. (This is the first time the Planning Commission is ever monitoring the progress of government policies.)
Apart from the physical allocations for various sectors, a first from this Plan is that it lays out a clear road-map for economic reforms in each sector. In the Department of Posts, for instance, the Plan asks for setting up an independent regulator which will fix tariff levels, as also for increased private sector participation.
So, once the Plan is approved (the NDC cleared the approach to the Plan last year), the Planning Commission will ask the ministry to outline its approach and set deadlines for achieving this.
Broadly speaking, each of the six members of the Commission is in charge of different sectors.
Som Pal, for instance, is in charge of agriculture and rural development, S.P. Gupta in charge of employment, N.K. Singh in charge of industry and infrastructure, and D.N. Tiwari in charge of forest and environment. The Commission’s rationale for doing this is that since a large part of the Plan’s success depends on the reforms getting implemented on time, it is very important for them to play this new role. That apart, since considerable additional funds are also being released to States for implementing reforms, the commission felt it needed to monitor the process. It has already reached some success in the case of Bihar.
The Bihar Chief Minister has agreed that of the additional Rs 1,000 crore to be given to the State (for losing its minerals to Jharkhand, primarily), a large part will be implemented by central government agencies.
A Rs 350 crore project to strengthen transmission and distribution lines in Bihar, for instance, is to be implemented by PowerGrid – the money will be directly released to PowerGrid, and this will in turn sign MoUs with various Bihar state organisations.
Under the Sam Vikas Yojana (basically, to reduce inter-State disparities), 100 most backward districts have been chosen, and a sum of Rs 15 crore is to be given to them per year – all projects in these districts will be personally supervised by the Commission.
A Rs 500 crore urban reform programme (to be given to states who reduce stamp duties, scrap urban land ceiling laws), similarly, will have to be monitored by the Commission.
The idea of transforming the Planning Commission into a reforms commission was first mooted by Montek Singh Ahluwalia—he wanted to call the Planning Commission the Commission for Economic Reforms—but this never took off for a variety of reasons when he was a member of the commission.
