The NITI Aayog, which replaced the Planning Commission, has been reduced to a mere think tank whose officials act as mouthpieces of the government.
Two events over the past two months inspired me to pen this month’s newsletter. One, the NITI Aayog (NITI being the National Institution for Transforming India) received a new vice-chairperson and a new chief executive officer. Two, India celebrated 29 June as National Statistics Day. On this day, the nation saluted the contributions of Professor P.C. Mahalanobis to the fields of statistics and planning. Mahalanobis was a pioneering practitioner of planning in India and a member of the Planning Commission, which was disbanded by the Narendra Modi government in 2015 and replaced with the NITI Aayog.
Seven years down the …
R. Ramakumar is an economist and a professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.
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