Monitoring body to be set up under NITI Aayog

NEW DELHI: A Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office will soon be set up under the government’s premier think tank NITI Aayog to keep a check on the Centre’s flagship programmes.

The new body will perform much the same role as the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO), set up by the previous government under the erstwhile Planning Commission, which was scrapped by the Narendra Modi government last year. A senior government official told ET that the DMEO will be set up as an attached office of the Aayog. It will subsume the Programme Evaluation Organisation (PEO) of the Planning Commission, which the Modi government replaced with the NITI Aayog this year.

The delay on part of the Prime Minister’s Office in finalising the role and structure of the new body has meant that the Aayog has not been able to make much progress in performing one of its key roles of evaluating government-run schemes.“DMEO will have two secretaries at the helm to oversee development, monitoring and evaluation of infrastructure schemes and social sectors schemes respectively,” said the official, who did not wish to be identified.

The two secretaries will directly report to the Aayog’s vice chairman Arvind Panagariya but the office will be structured in a way that it functions at an arm’s length from the think tank. The BJP-led NDA government had in September last year sacked Ajay Chhibber, the then director general of the IEO, leaving in limbo the institution that was set up with a lot of fanfare by the UPA government in 2013 following a cabinet decision in 2009.

IEO was also set up as an attached office of the Planning Commission and the post of director general was equivalent to a union minister of state, with a term of three years and extendable to five years. However, the Modi government, which took charge in May last year, became sceptical about the institution since a similar body called PEO existed simultaneously within the commission.

Since PEO was nearly as old as the commission and had immense exposure and experience of evaluating government-run schemes, the Modi government decided to reinvent PEO instead of retaining IEO. “The 175 odd people working in PEO have been retained despite massive restructuring of the Aayog itself which has slashed its staff strength by 60%. This is an indication that PEO has been reinvented and renamed as DMEO,” the official said. A formal notification to this effect could be issued shortly, he said.