Monday Musing: Rebooting PM’s Advisory System
By Dr Samar Verma*
Policy Brain for Complex Times
A useful thought experiment for our times is this: if governments accept that the economy is complex enough to warrant a Chief Economic Adviser and an Economic Advisory Council at the apex, what does it imply about the nature of today’s challenges that we have not built an equally deliberate “policy” brain at the centre?
This need not be framed as a hard proposal. It can be held as a sincere question- one that policy practitioners, administrators, legislators, and citizens might reasonably wonder about. The world’s toughest problems increasingly arrive not as single files but as bundles: climate risk braided with jobs and industrial strategy; malnutrition intertwined with women’s agency, sanitation and food cultures; inequality entangled with education, digital access, labour markets and social protection. These are the kinds of challenges that do not stay inside ministerial lanes, however well those lanes are drawn for accountability.
The argument, then, is not that existing institutions have failed. It is that the environment in which they must perform has changed. The state is being asked to solve problems that are intrinsically cross-sectoral, politically sensitive, and dynamic- often with feedback loops that create unintended consequences. When the challenge is complex, the advisory architecture must help leaders see the whole, not merely optimise one part.
When a single lens is no longer sufficient
Economic reasoning remains indispensable; no serious policymaking can proceed without it. But it is increasingly difficult to assume that an economic lens alone can integrate the full complexity of policy choices. Daniel Kahneman’s work is relevant here not because it is fashionable, but because it corrects a foundational assumption: human beings do not behave as perfectly rational actors. Decisions are shaped by cognitive shortcuts, social norms, emotions, narratives, and institutional incentives. When public policy is designed as though citizens, markets, and even bureaucracies respond mechanically to incentives and information, it tends to be surprised by low uptake, partial compliance, backlash, or perverse outcomes.
This is where an interdisciplinary policy lens becomes not a nice-to-have, but an enabling capability. It would systematically bring into the policy conversation how real people and institutions actually respond to incentives, information and norms, rather than how we assume they should respond. It would compel early attention to political economy — who wins, who loses, where resistance is likely, and what coalitions are necessary to make reforms stick beyond the announcement and the first budget cycle. It would integrate social and cultural dimensions, recognising that gender norms, caste, ethnicity, religion, and local context shape the uptake of policies as much as formal eligibility rules do. It would foreground technological and ecological limits, asking how digital systems and data governance, and equally natural resource constraints and ecological thresholds, constrain or enable policy options. And it would make explicit the ethical and rights-based trade-offs that policy inevitably carries: how to balance growth, inclusion, liberty, dignity and sustainability when objectives cannot all be maximised at once.
In that sense, “no person is a discipline” is not merely a rhetorical flourish. People live at the intersection of incentives and identity, scarcity and aspiration, trust and fear. The front-line worker, the small entrepreneur, the farmer, the adolescent student, the gig worker — none inhabit a single policy category. Their lives blend health and education, labour markets and mental well-being, digital systems and consumer protection, climate shocks and livelihood resilience. If citizens are interdisciplinary in practice, policy needs to be interdisciplinary in design.
The SDGs as a mirror to our governance architecture
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were, in effect, a global admission that development outcomes are interdependent. Poverty reduction links to health, learning outcomes, gender equality, decent work, reduced inequality, climate action and strong institutions. Yet governments do not operate as SDG “goal teams”; they operate as ministries, departments, and agencies. That is not a flaw — it is how accountability is maintained, budgets are allocated, and performance is monitored. But it does create a persistent coordination challenge: the problem is whole-of-government, while incentives can remain part-of-government.
This is where the question of a Chief Policy Adviser — or a Prime Minister’s Policy Advisory Council — begins to feel less like an institutional embellishment and more like a practical response to a structural gap. Such a function, if thoughtfully designed, would not compete with line ministries or substitute for political leadership. Its purpose would be integration: to help surface trade-offs early, sequence reforms realistically, stress-test policy against behavioural and implementation realities, and keep an eye on future risks before they harden into crises.
The business case: coordination failure is expensive
The most persuasive case for an apex policy integration function is not philosophical. It is economic in the plainest sense: coordination failure carries real costs. When policies are designed and delivered in silos, duplication proliferates, incentives collide, and delays emerge as conflicts surface late in the process. Investments underperform because complementary reforms were not sequenced. Programmes lose credibility when policy signals are inconsistent. In climate and food systems, the costs can be higher still, because early choices can lock in technologies, institutions, and behaviours that become expensive to reverse.
Conversely, better coherence produces tangible returns. Implementation accelerates because differences are negotiated upstream rather than discovered in crisis mode. Uptake improves because behavioural responses are anticipated rather than assumed away. Public spending becomes more effective because interventions reinforce each other. Policy becomes more stable because it is designed with political economy and social legitimacy in view. These are the mundane but powerful gains of good management – and the state, like any complex organisation, benefits when integration is engineered rather than hoped for.
This is also where caution is necessary. A poorly designed advisory layer could become another clearance stage, another committee that produces reports without reducing friction. The idea, therefore, is not simply “add a new body”, but rather to ask whether it is possible to institutionalise integration without institutionalising delay — keeping the function advisory, problem-focused, time-bound in interventions, and measured by whether it improves coherence and execution.
Reimagining NITI Aayog as India’s Centre of Excellence for interdisciplinary governance
If the phrase “Policy Aayog” sounds not too unfamiliar, it is because the aspiration already exists implicitly. The deeper question is whether NITI (National Institution for Transforming India) Aayog could be reimagined more deliberately and intentionally as a genuine Centre of Excellence for interdisciplinary governance — treating “policy” not as a synonym for planning, or for compiling schemes, but as a systems discipline that integrates economics, behavioural science, political economy, law, technology, ecology, and ethics.
In this form, NITI’s value would not lie only in strengthening advice to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. It could also become a credible, enabling resource for states: a platform that supports Chief Ministers and state cabinets as they navigate the same wicked problems — climate shocks, jobs transitions, nutrition, public health, urbanisation, digital governance — often under sharper fiscal and capacity constraints than the Centre. Rather than a one-way channel of guidance, it could operate as a two-way architecture of learning and problem-solving, where states shape the national policy imagination as much as they receive it.
A “Policy Aayog” mandate would position NITI to convene cross-ministry and Centre-state coalitions around priority transitions; embed behavioural and implementation stress-tests into major initiatives before scale-up; build rigorous learning loops across districts and states; and provide structured support for negotiating unavoidable trade-offs — growth with sustainability, innovation with safeguards, speed with inclusion. A similar institutional design might merit creation at levels of states, too, where much of policy action lies, and where the rubber hits the road.
An invitation, not a verdict
None of these forces a single conclusion. Institutional design must respect Constitutional roles, political realities, and administrative capacity. Yet the question remains worth asking—perhaps more urgently now than before. In a world where climate, inequality, hunger, malnutrition, food systems and technological disruption increasingly collide, the Centre may benefit from a formal interdisciplinary policy function — whether as a Chief Policy Adviser, a PM Policy Advisory Council, a strengthened Policy Aayog, or some combination that fits the national context.
The real issue is not whether we can imagine such structures. It is whether we can continue to pay the costs of not having a deliberate integrator, at precisely the moment when the problems we face refuse to be solved in parts, and much of the solution lies in the hands of sub-national governments.
*Samar Verma, PhD, is a senior economist, public policy professional and an institution-builder, with 28 years of experience in economic policy research, international development, grant-management and philanthropic leadership. Views are personal.
