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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Aiyar lambasts Centre and Plan panel for giving short shrift to panchayati raj

Aiyar lambasts Centre and Plan panel for giving short shrift to panchayati raj

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published Published on Sep 27, 2010   modified Modified on Sep 27, 2010


After taking on Suresh Kalmadi and Co on the Commonwealth Games, Rajya Sabha MP and former panchayati raj minister Mani Shankar Aiyar has now trained his guns on the UPA government and the Planning Commission for bureaucratising all flagship programmes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and the National Rural Health Mission.

In a free-wheeling interview with ET, Mr Aiyar said instead of relying on panchayati raj institutions for better development at the grassroots, the UPA government was bureaucratising its schemes. “The UPA government is the spiritual inheritor of Rajiv Gandhi’s legacy. It causes me such pain that instead of adopting Rajivian solutions to problems of poverty, we continue to look for colonial solutions. Unless we go back to Rajiv Gandhi’s principles, the dilemma of democracy and development is soon going to overwhelm us. As it is already doing in Jammu and Kashmir, in the jungles of central India and for so many decades in the northeast,” he said.

Showing no enthusiasm for Planning Commission’s ambitious Rs 15,000-crore Integrated Action Plan (IAP) for Naxal-affected districts, Mr Aiyar said the solution to problems like Naxalism lay in devolution of power and giving it to the people’s elected representatives at the grassroots. “IAP is flawed for two reasons — it is an additionality of funds where there are already funds earmarked and IAP does not make it obligatory for states to decentralise their delivery systems...We should first take CRPF away and empower the people to secure their entitlements on their own...We are simply not recognising that our prime failure is not having a revolution in our delivery systems,” he said, adding: “The answer is not throwing more money at the poor through bureaucracy, but it is making that money available.”

Mr Aiyar lashed out at his party’s government at the Centre, saying that while the world was curious about India’s model of grassroot democracy, the UPA government is not. “It (panchayati raj system) is so admired all over the world that I have been invited over the next five weeks to give lectures on the system at Oxford, London School of Economics, a conference of African nations in Kampala and University of Wisconsin, which has the oddest Indian studies unit. The only people who don’t seem to understand this are the present ministries of rural development and panchayati raj and our Planning Commission,” said Mr Aiyar. He added even if an iota of the attention given to the CWG had been given to strengthening of panchayati raj institutions, India would have prospered.

At a time when the government is struggling to achieve poverty alleviation and hunger eradication goals set in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, Mr Aiyar has pointed out that all centrally sponsored schemes are “deeply flawed”. “They are flush with resources, but vast additional resources are simply not reaching the intended beneficiaries. This is because current delivery system is based on bureaucracy and technocracy which absorbs, as Rajiv Gandhi had pointed out, 85 paise in every rupee of budgetary outlays. But a recent Planning commission estimate shows that Rajiv Gandhi was wrong and it is really 83 paise. The prime minister has expressed some scepticism on this. Since he is the great economist, lets say this is 75 paise. But is it acceptable? Especially when an alternate system of delivery is written in our Constitution (panchayati raj institutions).”

Counting schemes like NREGA, the National Rural Health Mission, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the Integrated Child Development Scheme, Mr Aiyar said: “...I could extend the list to cover all of the hundreds of centrally sponsored schemes on which our budget outlays are being squandered with virtually no impact on participative human development at the grassroots.”

He said the state governments “don’t go beyond and think in terms of how to provide employment” and the Centre keeps saying that the states are not utilising the earmarked funds. Mr Aiyar suggested that the way out is to have a non-lapsable pool of money for NREGA. “Whatever is not utilised should go into a central pool. It is evident that the degree of distress is quite distinct and different in various districts all across the country. A state like Punjab or districts in Western Maharashtra would not need so much NREGA funds as, say, Orissa would. So, more distressed states can dip into this central pool.”


The Economic Times, 27 September, 2010, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics/nation/Aiyar-lambasts-Centre-and-Plan-panel-for-giving-short-shrift-to-panchayati-raj/articleshow/6633590.cms


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