Zee Media Bureau
New Delhi: Former Planning Commission member Arun Maira has revealed that former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had inducted him as a change management expert but never backed any changes.
In his upcoming book "An Upstart in Government: Journeys of Change and Learning", to be released next Wednesday, he also said that former Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia was a reluctant reformer.
Maira admitted that he felt let down at the end of his tenure at the Planning Commission as the leadership asked him to find solutions, accepted his ideas, but never implemented them.
He further said PM Narendra Modi scrapped the Planning Commission during his first seven months in office. He replaced it with Niti Aayog focused on co-operative federalism — exactly the reforms that Singh had in mind but couldn't implement during his ten years in office.
The former PM admitted this to Maira after a parliamentary panel meeting this January after the Aayog was set up, when he thanked the latter for making him 'look good.'
Maira had told MPs in the parliamentary standing committee on finance and planning that the Niti Aayog's charter of working closely with states and being an essay in persuasion was the same vision first enunciated by the UPA PM.
"The Congress keeps jumping up every time the Modi government announces something, saying it was their idea. Well, then why didn't it do anything about those ideas," Maira told Economic Times.
"We were told that the PM would meet us once every month. That never happened. He relied only on Ahluwalia and chaired Commission meetings just once or twice a year," Maira said, adding that they had identified the new paradigm for the Commission, set up by Nehru in 1950, in our first eight months in the job.
But both Ahluwalia and Singh never applied those ideas. Since they were the people with authority on resources of the government, commission, unless they were going to put themselves behind the system, it couldn't happen. Later, they said change things on the side, but leave the core as it is, Maira said.
