The Hindu : Front Page : `Plan panel should not set targets for States'

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Sunday, Dec 10, 2006
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`Plan panel should not set targets for States'

Special Correspondent

Achuthanandan wants States to be given freedom to formulate their plans

V.S. Achuthanandan at the NDC meeting in New Delhi on Saturday.

NEW DELHI: Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan on Saturday said it was neither appropriate nor acceptable that the Planning Commission should fix social sector, output and employment targets for States. At the same time, he said these and other reservations the State had about the Approach Paper for the Eleventh Five-Year Plan would not "stand in the way of my accepting whatever `consensus' emerges at this meeting of the National Development Council."

The Commission's bid to set targets for States would run contrary to the federal spirit of the Constitution and restrict democracy, the Chief Minister pointed out. "When the electorate of a State elects one government as opposed to another, it ipso facto chooses one particular development strategy.... If the Planning Commission specifies a set of detailed targets for each State Government, then it is negating that choice of the electorate. State Governments must have the freedom to work out their own plans if the electoral choice of the people is to be respected."

Besides citing these two political reasons for disagreeing with the Commission's attempt to set targets for States, Mr. Achuthanandan dwelt at length on the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) to highlight the operational difficulties in meeting such goals. He said the Mission — far from constituting a significant addition to the States' resources — put States in a fiscal bind. "It is hardly appropriate for the Planning Commission to fix social sector targets for States when programmes such as the JNNURM catch them with `conditionalities,' which make these targets that much more difficult to achieve.''

The Chief Minister also found fault with what he described as the Planning Commission allowing the private sector to "cherry pick." This was in reference to the paper projecting "the State not as withdrawing from the economic arena, but as engaging with it in a different manner by focussing on those spheres where the private sector was loath to enter and leaving the other spheres to the private sector."

About Centrally Sponsored Schemes (CSS), Mr. Achuthanandan said the inherent rigidities and "bewildering multiplicity" of such programmes make them difficult to cope with. Add to this, the preference within the bureaucracy for infrastructure projects over social schemes; a case in point being the Employment Guarantee Scheme.

Also, he articulated Kerala's long-standing grievance about being penalised for its social achievements. The second generation problems arising from the success of Kerala's social progress required resources for their solution. If the Centre could not accept Kerala's plea for pooling funds meant for CSS and distributing them among States according to certain criteria, he said the least it could consider was building in an element of flexibility into CSS.

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