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Business News/ Politics / Policy/  We don’t need a poverty number to brandish around: Bibek Debroy
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We don’t need a poverty number to brandish around: Bibek Debroy

The economist and NITI Aayog member talks about the way ahead for this nascent institution that replaced the Planning Commission

Bibek Debroy, economist and member, NITI Aayog. Photo: Pradeep Gaur/MintPremium
Bibek Debroy, economist and member, NITI Aayog. Photo: Pradeep Gaur/Mint

Economist Bibek Debroy is known for his frank views on issues within and outside the government. So when he was chosen as a member of NITI Aayog, the successor to the Planning Commission, it surprised quite a few, since only days before he had written an article seeking answers from the government about the functioning of the new body. Debroy now says most of the questions he then raised have been resolved by the recommendations of the 14th Finance Commission since it decided to directly transfer a bulk of the central funds to the states without requiring the intermediation of any Planning Commission-like body. In an interview, Debroy talks about the way ahead for this nascent institution. Edited excerpts:

NITI Aayog is now three months old. What are the challenges that you are facing in building the institution?

First thing is that any organization is a function of the people you have, and people does not simply mean a vice-chairman and two members who have been appointed. People also means what the Planning Commission used to call as advisors. We need to check whether the people we have inherited are necessarily the right people—they may be, they may not be. Also because they were here for certain other tasks and the mandate has changed, and then you need to get in people from outside who are not here right now, these people may not necessarily be from the government. Now doing all of that—restructuring the human resources (HR) part—takes a little bit of time and until that is done, you can’t really get fully started.

To add to that, we don’t yet have a website, we will soon have a website. I think the website should be up and running in the next 15 days. Until the website is up, apart from whatever is being carried in the newspapers, people in the outside world don’t necessarily know what we are doing.

Earlier, advisors and below them were divided into silos. To some extent, you need the silos because they help in interacting with ministries. But we are also consciously trying to break down the silos. For example, earlier, if there was a meeting on energy, only energy people will attend, now everyone will attend at that level. The HR part will take at least two months, so until then, we don’t know. There has to be someone to handle energy. There has to be someone for infrastructure. Whether the infrastructure will be divided into energy and transport or the same person will cover both, I don’t know.

So how different is NITI Aayog from the Planning Commission?

The mandate for NITI Aayog is consciously different. The old Planning Commission used to have these five-year plans, those five-year plans involved projections, they were essentially devised sitting here in this building, they were trying to determine all kinds of things including resource allocation in an era when resource allocation was being increasingly driven by the private sector. So you had projections, you had forecasts, which turned out to be very, very unrealistic.

There is still a planning part, but not in that sense, which is why we don’t use the word planning. This is much more sort of forward looking. This is not tied to that five-year time frame...we look at India 20 years down the line and here is where we want India to be, according to this indicator or that indicator, maybe a human development indicator or doing business indicator, doesn’t matter, this is where we want India to be, so that is the goal we are progressing towards.

But India is not Delhi, so to get towards, let’s say the infant mortality rate of X per thousand in the year 2020-21, you need to work up from below, which is a constitutional mandate, but that decentralized planning never really worked under the old Planning Commission. Now that decentralized part, building up from below, is something we consciously really want to do.

Ideally, one should do that building up from the level of the villages of course. But at the village level, quite often data becomes a problem, so we will probably begin to do it district upwards, with the idea of eventually disaggregating it further.

You talked about the data problem. Will you drive to revamp the data collection systems?

I will not use the word drive. But we will clearly work closely with the National Statistical Commission, the chief statistician, because in a general way, there is a big problem with data, particularly the data that pertains to the informal unorganized sector. We are very conscious that we have to look at that. But we have a long list of things to do. So we need to prioritize.

Will you also review the existing government schemes?

Part of our mandate is to take a look at the existing schemes, see if they need improvements, maybe they need to be tweaked, and even suggest new schemes if that be the case. We are an intermediary body for the Union government and the states. We will be much more involved with actual implementation of the schemes both at the central government level as well as at the state government level, which is why the governing council consists of not only chief ministers, but also all Union ministers. There are also going to be regional councils of chief ministers, which have not yet been set up. The argument is, regions sometime have specific issues. For example, the northeastern region: The public expenditure schemes are meant for delivery of public goods and services, and the cost of delivery of goods and services varies and is higher in hilly areas, in which case what can be called the Himalayan states can have a different set of problems from the rest. So maybe there is a case for having a regional council for Himalayan states.

You don’t have any control on the finances of state-level schemes. Those schemes are structured and implemented by the states. Will your recommendations be taken seriously?

Essentially, it is meant for disseminating information and to start a debate. Influence need not necessarily be linked with money. Yes, there will be states that listen and states that say we don’t care. My personal reaction will be, effectively it is the job of the residents of that particular state to vote out the inefficient government.

Apart from monitoring and evaluating the government schemes, what other role will you play?

The expression think tank has often been used for us. It is a think tank, but the expression need not be interpreted as an academic think tank. We are only interested in things that have actual policy component. So we perceive one of our major roles in that think-tank mode of setting out what are the development/governance priorities for the country in the federal sense. We will soon start a series of think pieces to start the debate. This is the source of intellectual material that the government has access to. The other role is, this is a depository of information on best practices across states. One thing is clear, we don’t want to be too normative. In the sense, we don’t want to say Maharashtra is the No. 1 state. We would rather say on this particular parameter, Maharashtra has done well, Tamil Nadu has done well on that particular parameter. We will also do reports on states to find out what are the development gaps in each state. We are still debating how often to do it. Because we are starting out, we should do all of them so that we have a baseline. But doing all of them takes a lot of resources. So maybe we will have a baseline, which is not a detailed description of a state, and then we do states in groups for the detailed stuff. We have not zeroed in on the exact time frame.

There has been a task force on poverty reduction set up under NITI Aayog. Will it also measure poverty and redraw the poverty line?

This X% below poverty line is based on NSSO (National Sample Survey Office) data. NSSO is not a census, but a survey. Survey does not tell me whether a household is poor or not poor. It has no policy relevance whatsoever. The only way I can find that is through decentralized identification, which is what the Socio Economic and Caste Census is supposed to do for rural India. Also, NSSO data comes after five years. People go above the poverty line and they get below the poverty line. In 2015, what will I do with the data of 2011-12. Second question is, poverty has many different dimensions. Having a kachha house is one dimension of poverty, suffering on health and education indicators is another dimension of poverty. According to different indicators, a person may or may not be below the poverty line. If there are, let’s say, 20 indicators, I can have a cut-off for each of them. If person X is below that cut-off in all 20 indicators, he is poor. The moment you want one number, you are asking me to assign weights to these 20. Whatever method I decide will be arbitrary. I do something, somebody will write a column saying I got a different measurement. Why should I unnecessarily cause problems for myself when it serves no policy relevance whatsoever. It’s purely a sterile academic exercise because the actual poverty alleviation is not contingent on it at all.

So the task force will not come out with a poverty line?

Factually, the task force has not decided yet. But there is no obvious reason why identification of a poor person across 20 parameters is not good enough instead of one number that I can brandish around.

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Published: 21 Apr 2015, 12:34 AM IST
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