Road transport and highways minister Kamal Nath has articulated a widely-held view that the Planning Commission is an armchair adviser with no accountability or performance targets. That he did so in the presence of Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia made it all the more significant. "When the PM inaugurated Terminal 3 at IGIA, we all were very delighted. I asked one of the persons, I don't want to name, how they could do this great work. The person said it was possible because the Planning Commission people had nothing to do with it," the minister is reported to have said with some relish at an event organised by the commission. 

The minister squarely blamed the commission for not allowing him to achieve his ambitious target of building 20 km of highways every day. He said the commission failed to differentiate between Kerala and Madhya Pradesh, for example, because it had always been far removed from the ground realities.

While Nath is the first minister to slam the commission in public, he is not the first or the only one who has had a difference of opinion with this non-statutory body that is not accountable to Parliament. State governments, especially those run by political parties opposed to the party at the Centre, are seldom satisfied by the funds recommended for allocation to them by the central government. Outside the government, too, Planning Commission's critics have only grown ever since the country embarked on economic liberalisation. Days of top-down economic development are long over, the critics say, and the commission can only stand in the way of all-round growth in the manner that the people want it.

Reviving as he has done the debate on the role, and even existence, of the commission, has the minister rightly characterised it as an armchair adviser?