With a veritable alphabetical soup of special panels — from the ever-lasting Liberhans Commission to others appointed by the UPA — taking up most of the government and PSU buildings in the national capital, the Thirteenth Finance Commission (TFC) has been hardpressed for the past few months to find suitable office space.

Finally, after hunting high and low, the panel has got a floor for itself, on a private property — the Hindustan Times Building.

The panel that is constitutionally required to make recommendations on the distribution of tax revenues between the Union of India and the states was earlier located on the top floor of Janpath’s Jawahar Bhawan.

However, Arjun Sengupta’s National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS), whose tenure ends this September, now occupies it.

Notified on November 14, the TFC worked out of two rooms in North Block for a month. Even as a hunt for premises was on, around mid-December, the Commission started operating out of a 5,000-sq-ft office in LIC’s Jeevan Bharti Building in Connaught Place as soon as it was vacated by the Interim Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA).

The PFRDA was expected to move to a new office in South Delhi by August 2007, but civil work hold-ups delayed the shift till December 16. A huge board emblazoned with PFRDA’s name still lies next to the entrance to the Commission’s temporary office.

“Earlier, finance commissions found space in government/public sector buildings easily. But with a number of special bodies around, such as the NCEUS, the Administrative Reforms Commission, the Economic Advisory Council to the PM and the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council (the last three are in the Vigyan Bhawan campus), we couldn’t find enough space in a single location. We didn’t want our officers to shuttle between different buildings,” a TFC official told The Indian Express.

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