Scrapping the Planning Commission was a radical break from the Nehruvian legacy of centralised planning based not entirely on the Soviet model but on a ‘mixed economy’. It is not a mere ruse to get rid of the ‘Left baggage’. What we now have in its place for the last nearly four years, is a ‘Think Tank’, with the best of domain experts in a range of public policy issues, well meaning leaders of industry and academics, called the ‘National Institution for Transforming India’, ‘NITI Aayog’.
NITI is driving the new concepts, models and praxis for a ‘New India’, on technologies that are shaping the way government is designing and implementing programmes: Whether it is ‘Direct Benefit Transfer being implemented across 437 schemes and that has helped save Rs.83,000 crore, digitisation lowering tax collection costs, GST rollout increasing indirect taxpayers base by an amazing 50 per cent, focus on artificial intelligence applications in a range of areas from health to education, the new focus on “blockchain-based smart contracts which will reduce litigation, ot the land registry on the blockchain that will reduce corruption relating to land. As someone calls it, technologies everywhere, ‘from tilling to toilets’!
India is already a huge economy and growing, growing not at the modest ‘Hindu rate of growth’, but to ambitious targets of eight to 12 per cent!
NITI Ayog is changing patterns in a new political context where being ‘right’ may not be wrong!
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