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NEW DELHI: NITI Aayog replaced Planning Commission as the Government’s ‘Think Tank’ on 1st January, 2015 but doubts persist how will this advisory body be effective when it can allocate no funds to back up its advice.

Within six months of the NDA government’s coming to power in May, 2014, the project monitoring group (PMG) was moved from the cabinet secretariat to be under the prime minister’s office (PMO). The intention was to push 225 big-ticket projects worth Rs. 13 lakh crore pending since the UPA government era. Of them, 194 belonged to the category involving individual project investment of Rs. 1,000 crore and above. However, the total number of pending projects till the end of the previous Congress-led UPA government was much larger, numbering, as per official records, 494. The estimated cost of all these projects was Rs.24.68 lakh crore at 2013 prices. What had reportedly held up these projects were a multi-layered red tape obstruction involving as many as1,622 issues requiring as many solutions or clearances.

Former CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat’s thesis, that “politics is just not yes and no”, is his latest contribution to Marxist dialectics apart from being a reality check on friends and foes.

Sketching contemporary events with a historical perspective is always end up inviting strong reactions and fierce refutations. Self interests tend to disbelieve historical interpretations of events caused by or benefits accrued to them. The growing dissatisfaction of the middle class with the present regime as it failed to reap a rich harvest of benefits from the promised rapid economic growth tells a different story. The elite class was invariably the exclusive beneficiary of the economic development. It expected NaMo would deliver more to them. Instead they find he was overcrowding markets with new entrants.

Jharkhand chief minister Raghubar Das has come under attack from his BJP colleagues for the defeat of BJP candidate from Lohardaga. At the recently held state unit meet of the BJP some senior leaders sought to know from the leadership why the party could not encash the good will created by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the state. The loss has acquired a bigger dimension as the winner from this assembly seat has been the Congress, which according to the BJP president Amit Shah, was a non entity in the state politics.

Opposition parties, though in sixes and sevens, have gone hammer and tongs on the 'belated and inadequate' response of her Government in rescue and relief operations. And they now see a ray of hope, with the incipient anti-incumbency factor, but as yet there is no credible alliance in sight to take on still formidable AIADMK in the Assembly elections in May this year.

As curtains are drawn on the year 2015, let us look back at last 12 months and what the New Year 2016 portends. If the year 2014 saw the Modi wave sweeping across the country, then 2015 saw emergence of new political challenges, and the gap between promise and delivery. Electorally, the year 2015 saw BJP being wiped out in Delhi by Aam Aadmi Party and the rout at the hands of the Nitish-Lalu combine in Bihar was equally shocking. Politics enters 2016 with the lesson that opposition unity can stump the BJP juggernaut. Already, there are signs of new alignment, with Arvind Kejriwal, Mamata Banerjee and Nitish Kumar emerging as the possible pivot of a joint opposition pincer.

Several innovative and out of box solutions to basic problems are found in India but we seem to be very poor in implementing and hence ideas never get translated into action for the general good of the people. Solar energy is one area where implementation is tardy despite lofty targets by the Indian government. The previous UPA government planned to achieve 22,000 MW of solar power generation by 2022, which by itself was seen as ambitious then at the beginning of 12th five year plan in 2012. The Narendra Modi government scaled it up further to achieve one lakh MW of solar power generation in the next five years, which at the moment certainly looks just not possible to achieve going by what we have achieved in the last couple of years.

KOLKATA: In West Bengal, at least 270 tea plantation labourers have died in recent months because of starvation. While reporting such deaths almost daily, the print and electronic media refer to the phenomenon as ‘Mrityu michil’ in Bengali (The march of death). The victims are mostly tribal or Santhal workers, the poorest of the poor in the north Bengal tea plantations.

The year 2015 proved to be a bad year for the BJP. Starting from its rout in the Delhi Assembly polls, to the massive defeat in Bihar polls, to a series of defeats in Jharkhand, Gujarat and even Madhya Pradesh Lok Sabha by-poll to the latest municipal elections in the same State, there was nothing to boost the morale of the party that rules India. In West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee’s return for a second time is a foregone conclusion. Even the role of the main opposition party is likely to go to the CPI-M-led Left Front. Narendra Modi’s spectacular victory at the Centre last year is now a fading memory.