Given the Planning Commission is to be recast, a good idea would be to restrict its role to perspective planning, looking at the country?s needs in areas like water, energy, urbanisation, and the like, and then to suggest solutions to achieve this. A McKinsey analysis, for instance, reckoned that given the pace of India?s urbanisation, it would need to construct two Mumbais every year for the next two decades. Once such forecasting has been done, the solutions suggest themselves; it is obvious that land acquisition needs to be eased, that the carbon footprint will rise dramatically, and so on.
As the Planning Commission?s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) has suggested, the new-look Planning Commission needs to help find optimal solutions, to take the best practices from various states or countries and find ways to mainstream them. So when state governments, or the central government turns to the Planning Commission, it can offer a bouquet of solutions for them to choose from. If Tamil Nadu has found a simple way of implementing a central scheme like Indira Awaas Yojana (IAY) in a better manner, why can?t that be studied and replicated in other states? The IEO has found many such examples in the course of its evaluation of different schemes in the states. Tamil Nadu found that the R70,000 given under IAY for constructing a house was grossly inadequate, so it added R50,000 to it from its side. The R1.2 lakh amount allowed people to build houses with a small loan, at a cost of about R1.5-1.6 lakh. In the case of Kerala, the IEO found the quality of roads improved immensely merely because of a simple change in the roads contract?those building the roads were required to now maintain it for five years?who will build a road which gets washed off every year during the monsoon season, if he has to operate it for five years? The success of health schemes in Himachal Pradesh, similarly, showed there is a model that works provided, as in this case, the local population was involved in tracking and monitoring/running the schemes?this is the ?bhagidari? former Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit had tried to implement in various areas. A revamped Planning Commission of this sort would examine the desirability and feasibility of, for instance, a Gujarat-type feeder separation in the power sector. The new-look Plancom would have an IEO whose job would include evaluating all government schemes.
