On August 15, 2014, in his first Independence Day speech from the Red Fort’s ramparts, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the government would replace the Planning Commission with a new body.
The announcement paved the way for bringing the curtains down on a 64-year old institution founded on the former Soviet Union's command-style development model.
Modi did not name the institution, which he said will give a "new direction to lead the country based on creative thinking, public-private partnership, optimum utilisation of resources, utilisation of youth power of the nation, to promote the aspirations of state governments seeking development, to empower the state governments and to empower the federal structure".
Four-and-a-half months later, the NITI (National Institution for Transforming India) Aayog was set up, setting the stage to for a creating the government’s go-to policy think tank, abandoning the earlier one-size-fits-all approach to contemporary challenges.
The Planning Commission had come under increased scrutiny in its later years, with questions raised on the body's relevance in an economic environment where private entrepreneurship was one of the main growth engines.
NITI Aayog is housed in New Delhi's Yojana Bhawan, the same place where the erstwhile Planning Commission's headquarters, tasked with "providing both directional and policy inputs".
According to its website, "while designing strategic and long-term policies and programmes for the Government of India, NITI Aayog also provides relevant technical advice to the Centre and States".
"An important evolutionary change from the past, NITI Aayog acts as the quintessential platform of the Government of India to bring States to act together in national interest, and thereby fosters Cooperative Federalism," it says.
Over the last four years, NITI Aayog has played a significant role in shaping many signature policy initiatives, but has also been mired in controversies also, including the recent decision to release the back series GDP data.
Historically, GDP data has always been released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO), and experts questioned NITI Aayog's role in the new data that showed that growth during the UPA government was lower than earlier estimated.
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