The revamping and reconstituting of Niti Aayog comes at a crucial juncture when the country’s premier policy body needed a shot in the arm. The appointment of former chief economic adviser Ashok Kumar Lahiri as vice-chairperson is expected to provide the required intellectual heft and domain expertise to the body, which is yet to make a significant mark on the country’s policymaking in the past decade, unlike its predecessor, the Planning Commission. Of course, it will not be fair to compare the nascent think tank with the six-decade-old organisation that had a broader mandate, financial powers and an enviable space in the governance structure and overall body politic.
The new team has experts from domains that continue to be major focus areas of the BJP-led NDA government in its third term. The new team members director of AIIMS Delhi M Srinivas, bureaucrat Abhay Karandikar, economist KV Raju, and director of IISER Bhopal Gobardhan Das are expected to bring a breath of fresh air to the policymaking body that many believe has been going through a listless and somewhat dispirited phase.
The Aayog has had three vice-chairpersons since its inception, and each has tried to shape the organisation’s identity. Its first vice-chairperson, Arvind Panagariya, set off with ambitious plans of making it a strategy-driven think tank which would chalk out a 15-year vision, 7-year strategy and 3-year action plan. Then came Rajiv Kumar who turned it into an organisation that launched several outcome-based indices such as SDG India Index, Composite Water Management Index, and Health and School Education Quality Index. Some flagship initiatives, such as the Aspirational Districts Programme, did bring about change, even if analysts considered it to be modest. Suman Bery, who took over from Kumar, among other things, expanded the aspirational districts programme to cover aspirational blocks. In a decade of its existence, it continued to be a work in progress. The main problem was the lack of financial power, which turned it into a toothless body, so to speak. It tried to find its feet in the policy space by projecting itself as a robust knowledge hub and monitoring and evaluation body.
Two major issues faced by Niti Aayog were dealing with federalism and operating in an environment where plurality and dissenting views were not encouraged and sometimes even suppressed. Despite political rhetoric, the BJP was perceived to be a party that believed in the concentration of power in the Centre and often at the cost of the states. In such a scenario, the Aayog’s talk about cooperative federalism and competitive federalism was viewed with considerable scepticism. Secondly, the BJP is often accused of being intolerant of contrarian views, dissenting opinions, and non-conformist perspectives, and in the process, authentic and credible data becomes scarce, and its integrity tends to be compromised. In such a scenario, policymaking space could end up in an echo chamber with the attendant confirmation bias. To make matters worse, there is a certain opacity with regard to the actual process of policymaking and legislation at the Centre. In this context, it would be unrealistic to expect the new team to usher in any significant structural or transformational changes. The least the political establishment could do is to give it some more autonomy and a transparent and relatively better-structured and empowered mechanism for implementing its policies and prescriptions.