Cabinet's leash on PC's pet project

The Union cabinet on Thursday approved the constitution of a Cabinet Committee on Investment (CCI) to coordinate and fast-track projects worth Rs1,000 crore and more.
This tantamounts to a watering down of finance minister P Chidambaram’s ambitious proposal for setting up of the overarching National Investment Board (NIB).
The cabinet took cognisance of the vociferous objections by environment minister Jayanti Natrajan and rural development minister Jairam Ramesh. So, the rechristened NIB is now more or less yet another cabinet committee and not the overlord feared by ministers.
The CCI will have the prime minister as its chairman and ministry heads as members. Instead of giving it overriding powers, as proposed by Chidambaram, the cabinet limited its role to just coordination with ministries.
Now, it will not even be an appellate authority against regulators, who could have put spokes in the clearance process of projects citing various reasons.
With its constitution, the present cabinet committee on infrastructure will be dissolved and all its powers subsumed into the cabinet committee on economic affairs.
 A cabinet source said mandatory approval of projects would continue to be vested with the ministries. Many ministers had objected that the creation of a body like NIB with no constitutional authority would have led to the redundancy of various ministries.