Goodbye economic planning. Hello policy anarchy

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Editor's note: 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 line, how do we assess this shift in policy? Any discussion on the demise of the Planning Commission and the establishment of the NITI Aayog cannot be divorced from history and politics. Historically, the Sangh Parivar was against economic planning and all forms of state intervention in the economy. From the time of Independence, they opposed planning as a “Western” idea and actively sided with the views of right-wing economists of the time. Two illustrations must suffice. One, the Sangh …