New Delhi: India’s new right-wing premier Narendra Modi on Friday announced an end to Soviet-style economic planning in an Independence Day speech as he pressed ahead with modernising the government’s cumbersome policymaking apparatus.
The commission, set up in 1950, was a relic of the socialist policies put in place by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been impressed by the then-Soviet Union’s command economy with its central planning and five-year economic blueprints.
The commission was relevant in earlier days, said Modi, who took office in May after a landslide election won by his Bharatiya Janata Party.
“But the prevalent situation in the country is different, the global scenario has also changed,” Modi told a huge crowd at the historic Red Fort in Old Delhi in a speech to mark India’s 68th year of independence.
Now “to take India forward”, the commission must be replaced by a body that will have “a new soul, a new thinking, a new direction... based on creative thinking,” he said.
The commission was increasingly seen as too rigid and out-of-tune with the needs of a fast-paced growing economy.
When he was chief minister of Gujarat, Modi had also been sharply critical of the commission’s blanket bureaucratic policies for India’s states.
The death knell for the commission was sounded by the government-backed Independent Evaluation Office in June which proposed jettisoning the commission and establishing a policy think-tank in its place.
The commission, seen as something of a sacred cow under previous governments, had “defied attempts” to reform it, the office said bluntly in a report.
The writing was clearly on the wall for the commission’s demise when the body was excluded from discussions on the new government’s budget in July.
Modi’s efforts in passing legislation to reform India’s still largely state-dominated economy have been slowed by opposition in parliament’s upper house where his party does not enjoy a majority.
But he has been moving swiftly to revamp government departments to make them more productive and end regulatory bottlenecks that have kept major industrial projects on hold for years.
Since taking power, Modi has clubbed departments together under super-ministries to simplify administrative structures and accelerate decision-making.