Manmohan Singh’s trusted aide Arun Maira is now calling the Ex PM and Montek Singh ‘reluctant reformers’

Former Planning Commission member Arun Maira has come up with some startling revelations about former PM Manmohan Singh which could further spoil his image. He has said that Singh had inducted him as a change management expert but never backed any changes. He also alleged that former Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia was a reluctant reformer.

Maira is going to make these revelations public via his upcoming book to be released next Wednesday. Maira admitted that he felt let down at the end of his tenure at the Planning Commission as the leadership asked him to find solutions, accepted his ideas, but never implemented them.

He further said PM Narendra Modi scrapped the Planning Commission during his first seven months in office. He replaced it with Niti Aayog focused on co-operative federalism — exactly the reforms that Singh had in mind but couldn't implement during his ten years in office.

The former PM admitted this to Maira after a parliamentary panel meeting this January after the Aayog was set up, when he thanked the latter for making him 'look good.'

Maira had told MPs in the parliamentary standing committee on finance and planning that the Niti Aayog's charter of working closely with states and being an essay in persuasion was the same vision first enunciated by the UPA PM.

"The Congress keeps jumping up every time the Modi government announces something, saying it was their idea. Well, then why didn't it do anything about those ideas," Maira told ET.

"We were told that the PM would meet us once every month. That never happened. He relied only on Ahluwalia and chaired Commission meetings just once or twice a year," Maira said, adding that they had identified the new paradigm for the Commission, set up by Nehru in 1950, in our first eight months in the job.

But both Ahluwalia and Singh never applied those ideas. Since they were the people with authority on resources of the government, commission, unless they were going to put themselves behind the system, it couldn't happen. Later, they said change things on the side, but leave the core as it is, Maira said.

In his book An Upstart in Government: Journeys of Change and Learning, former Tata Group manager and Boston Consulting Group chief Maira traces his story from a single phone call requesting him to join the government as a change agent in the middle of a 2009 holiday in Prague, till his last meeting with the Commission in April 2014.

Singh repeated the same existential questions about the Commission's relevance that he had raised five years earlier. Maira was surprised as the commission's members had identified afresh what needed to be done by their successors.

"The government was besieged by criticism in its last year and was very defensive, with ministers floating 'zero loss' theories about scams. I don't know if Ahluwalia sent forward our view to the PM as a Niti Aayog-type charter is what we had in mind," Maira said, hinting that the UPA was keen not to admit that its style of running the Commission wasn't optimal.

"Every time I hear Modi speak, it strikes me that he gets all the things the Congress leadership refused to accept. Whether it's Make In India instead of a manufacturing policy focused purely on investment enclaves that required massive land tracts, or the focus on job creation," Maira said.

Maira pointed to a major anomaly in the Commission's working - its members have minister of state ranks but none of its staff report directly to the members.

"We had drivers, door-openers, paper-carriers, but no professional staff. Advisors working on our subjects would be transferred or go on leave without us having a clue," he said.

Ahluwalia pursued a move to allow two professionals for each member of the Commission, including himself, but was unable to do it. Finally, Ahluwalia is learnt to have told Maira that he couldn't expedite such government processes, so Maira must seek help from outside the government.

This compelled Maira to talk to Tata Sons' director R Gopalakrishnan and Mahindra group chief Anand Mahindra to lend some managers to the think tank.

(Image: Indiatimes)