Visit to the Indian Planning Commision

The visit to the Planning commission in New Delhi was very different from all the company and NGO trips that we had been doing because this is a government office. I think this is a very key organization that people doing business in India need to watch for two reasons. Firstly, in addition to policy, the sustainability of the infrastructure has to be understood in any business plan involving a developing country – and more so for India because of it’s socialist roots. Secondly, one of the successfully used models in India today is the Public Private Partnership (PPP) model which uses a combination of public and private sector investments to fund infrastructure initiatives. Public funds are primarily aimed to be utilized in areas where the private sector is unlikely to invest and then the governing body ensures that revenue generating models are established to bring in private funds in the future. PPP initiatives provide new investment opportunities for foreign investors (like U.S. companies) and therefore, it helps to understand the government planning process, commitments and organization.

The Chairman of the Planning Commission is the Prime minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh and the Deputy chairman is Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia. Both men are credited with a lot of the Indian economic reforms implemented in the last couple of decades.

We were looking forward to meeting Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia but he was called away in the last minute and our meeting was set up with Mr. B.K Chaturvedi instead. We were quite fortunate despite the change because Mr. B.K.Chaturvedi is a recently retired Cabinet Secretary and is now a key member of the Planning commission. The Cabinet Secretary post is typically held by India's most influential and powerful bureaucrat reporting to the Prime minister and I was very pleasantly surprised that he took the time to meet us and enthusiastically answer all our questions.

Mr. Chaturvedi started by giving us a brief introduction to the planning commission’s functions. The Planning Commission is a formal body for civic and economic planning in India. One of its primary functions includes formulating the ‘Five year plans’ outlining the national economic planning for that term. It also assesses, prioritizes and monitors the country’s resources to ensure the successful execution of the plans.

Mr. Chaturvedi highlighted some major issues in the current five year plan (2007 to 2012) and acquainted us with the magnitude of the problems/projects they are covering for the nation as a whole
• Maintaining the GDP rate of growth (currently just above 9%)
• Telecom infrastructure – Planning for the addition of seven million new telephones every month.
• Utilities – India currently has an unsustainable model for Utilities with 40% lost in theft and transmission problems!
• Energy – India has a 9-10% capacity shortage in electricity and power. They are nowhere near the wattage goal set in the 5 year plan.
• Public Private Partnership (PPP) models – Aviation, railways and ports opened up to private investments. This model has been working very well and several airport and railway functions have been privatized.

The commission’s main focus now is to identify places of low productivity, but good capacity and focus on improving that. He listed several farming initiatives such as the ‘Agriculture Produce and Marketing Act’ which educates farmers on usage of better quality of seeds and irrigation facilities, and the ‘Horticulture mission’ which encourages cultivation of produce like fruit, vegetables, spices, medicinal & aromatic plants, flowers etc. that have a better contribution to GDP.

Another topic we covered was on the provision of access to potable water. Many of us on this trip did not really experience the water shortage India is facing because all our nice hotels and company visits had uninterrupted hot and cold water supply, but I found through several sources that most cities and rural areas operate under severe water shortages. India has very few sources left providing potable water. Mr. Chaturvedi commented that they had already contained the water problems to a large extent in the past, but water sources that were once operational are drying up or getting contaminated which has reintroduced the issue in a big way. Moreover, during the recent years which did not have favorable monsoons, many farmers switched to siphoning groundwater to make up for the lack of water in canals and other irrigation sources. This lowered the ground water table and dried up wells and pumps which are key drinking water sources for many in the rural regions.

For me, discussion of such basic infrastructure issues really brought home the management intricacies of the government planning process. This applies in any country, including the USA which also has to account for resource usage across the diverse state policies, topologies, weather and technology availability. All this needs to be accomplished in a holistic and sustainable way when thinking about newer technologies as well, such as solar or hydrogen power.

It was interesting to hear all the alternative energy and low pollution projects India was working on especially the hydrogen car initiative, but even Mr. Chaturvedi acknowledged that the scale of all the alternative energy projects was not enough to address the needs of the rapid economic growth in a country already so strapped for energy and water.

Balancing growth with resource capacity was not a new topic to most of us. As we are residents of southwestern USA, topics like pollution, water shortages and water allocation politics are quite relevant even if on a smaller scale. Watching, learning and perhaps helping India address some of these issues over the next few years could be very pertinent for us.

-Kamala Dasika