NITI Aayog snippets

The government has appointed Columbia University professor and eminent economist Arvind Panagariya as vice chairman of NITI Aayog, which has replaced the 65-year old Planning Commission.
Former DRDO secretary V K Saraswat and economist Bibek Debroy have been appointed full-time members.The panel will consist of finance minister Arun Jaitley , home minister Rajnath Singh, railway minister Suresh Prabhu and agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh as ex -officio members, a PMO statement said. Union ministers Nitin Gadkari, Thawar Chand Gehlot and Smriti Zubin Irani are special invitees to the panel.
The Centre has proposed the setting up of NITI Aayog for central and state governments. Economist Arvind Panagariya, who has been named the vice-chairman of NITI Aayog, will be given Cabinet rank. In the lead up to the 2014 general elections, Panagariya had endorsed Modi’s policies and had backed the Gujarat model of development.
He is currently the Jagdish Bhagwati professor of Indian political economy in the department of international and public affairs and of economics in Columbia university. Previously, he was a professor of economics and co-director of the Centre for International and Public Affairs at the University of Maryland, and the chief economist of the Asian Development Bank. He has also advised the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and UNCTAD in various capacities, according to his department’s website.
Panagariya has written or edited more than a half-dozen books and writes for several national and international newspapers and magazines.He was considered to be a front runner for the chief economic adviser’s job but the government had shied away from naming him.
The NITI Aayog will be headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and have a vice chairman and a CEO. The effort will be to involve states in economic policy-making, and move away from the top-down approach of the past. Modi had announced the scrapping of the Planning Commission in his Independence Day speech and had consulted chief ministers before unveiling the new institution.
According to a government statement, an important evolutionary change from the past will be replacing a centre-to-state one-way flow of policy with a genuine and continuing partnership with the states. “Perhaps most importantly, the institution must adhere to the tenet that while incorporating positive influences from the world, no single model can be transplanted from outside into the Indian scenario. We need to find our own strategy for growth. The new institution has to zero in on what will work in and for India. It will be a Bharatiya approach to development,” the statement had said.