NEW DELHI: Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh inducted him into government as a change management expert and then didn’t back any change, while Manmohan’s ‘reform champion’ Montek Singh Ahluwalia was no more than a reluctant reformer, former Planning Commission member Arun Maira has said in his book, to be released next Wednesday.Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his first seven months in office scrapped the commission, replacing it with Niti Aayog focused on co-operative federalism —exactly the reforms that Singh had in mind but couldn’t implement during his 10 years in office.Manmohan 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, chaired by Congress’ Veerappa Moily, 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, admitting he felt let down at the end of his tenure at the commission as the leadership asked him to find solutions, accepted his ideas, but never implemented them. “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 their first eight months in the job.“But both Ahluwalia and Singh were not applying themselves to make it happen. 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 India chief Maira traces his story from a 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 Neeti 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. Modi, who thought poorly of the commission and had a verbal showdown in his last meeting with the panel members as Gujarat chief minister in 2014, had also appreciated the commission’s advice engaging with states beyond monetary allocations. “Kabhi kabhi aap log acchhi baatein batate hain,” Modi had said about the move.When Montek had asked Modi about some data on mortality rates in Gujarat, the state CM had promised to share the data as soon as he returned to Gandhinagar. However, when two members of the commission questioned some other data he presented on the state’s development, Modi lost his cool and said, “If you have your own data about everything, why are you asking me for data on mortality. You can get that yourself as well.” “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. Mod