Banking NITI Aayog

NITI Aayog

NITI Aayog known as National institution for transforming India came into existence on 1 January 2015 with good bye to six decades old planning commission. Planning Commission was established in 1950s to respond to development needs of India after independence. It made resources available to state government to meet their development needs and come up with five years plans for development.

Reasons why Planning Commission was replaced with Niti Aayog

Most of the criticism regarding planning commission was that it thrust its development agenda on states without their active collaboration and not considering their social economic uniqueness. One size fit for all solution was followed by planning commission.

Niti Aayog will be more like think tank advising central and state governments on strategic and technical issues across the spectrum of key elements of policy where as in planning commission there was no active participation of stakeholders.

Niti Aayog will have all the state chief ministers and Lt. Governor sincluded in the governing council where as in planning commission state chief ministers were not actively involved.

The mantra of Niti Aayog is inclusiveness with states as partners ,equality,transparency ,pro people ,empowering which was not visible in planning commission.

Niti Aayog will follow the bottom to top model of development to meet the specific development needs of village, states by having provision to form regional development council. It will provide flexible approach in development to pick experts from various sectors.

Structure of Niti Aayog

Prime Minister as chairman

CEO: Amitabh Kant

Vice chairman: Arvind Pangariya

Full time members Bibek Debroy and VK Saraswat

Two part time members

Four union ministers as ex-officio members(Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley, Suresh Prabhu and Radha Mohan Singh)

Governing council comprising of all state chief ministers and Lt. Governors.

Regional Councils which will be formed to address any state specific issues.

Invitees from different fields having relevant domain knowledge.