New Delhi, April 21: It is a long-drawn battle for DoNER minister Mani Shankar Aiyar this season.

For one, Delhi recently slashed the DoNER ministry’s projection of Rs 2,922 crore by almost half to Rs 1,455 crore. As a result, it may not be able to implement several development schemes in the region.

Worse, the Administrative Reforms Commission recommended last month that the ministry itself should be done away with.

The commission felt that the responsibility for the development of the ministry could be handed over to different ministries with the ministry of home affairs as the nodal ministry.

Aiyar said the issue of allocation was being discussed with the finance ministry. The states have been unable to spend their allocations and thus funds keep lying in the non-lapsable central pool of reserves.

“We got ourselves into a bit of a Catch-22,” he conceded, but maintained that he did not agree with the finance ministry that the northeastern states lacked absorptive capacity.

The commission’s recommendation that the Doner ministry should be scrapped has not been taken well by the northeastern states. Aiyar said this would be discussed at the plenary of the North Eastern Council on May 11 and 12.

The Congress MP from Mayiladuturai in Tamil Nadu lost his first battle when the petroleum ministry was divested. Then the sports and youth affairs portfolio became the casualty, which Aiyar said he wanted to give up anyway.

“I do not know why the media shows that it was taken away from me. I had told the Prime Minister and on TV that I did not want it,” he said.

He still holds independent charge of DoNER and panchayati raj, without a single minister of state.

But then during the elections in the Northeast, the fact was not lost on anyone that the DoNER minister was not on the Congress campaigners’ list. One of the allegations was that he was sleeping with the enemy by helping non-Congress state governments before the elections.

Aiyar’s immediate problem is the panchayati raj ministry. The minister stands to lose face in the national convention of chairpersons of district and block panchayats here tomorrow with his home state Tamil Nadu refusing to send any representatives.

The state government wrote to the panchayati raj secretary last week raising objections not only on the contents of the draft charter of the ministry but also “the manner in which the draft charter was prepared”.

The Tamil Nadu government has alleged that the charter was finalised by including names of four panchayat representatives without their knowledge.

Sources said, chief minister K.Karunanidhi also wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the issue on March 29.

“I request that our PRI representatives should not be called for such meetings at New Delhi or elsewhere without the knowledge of the government of Tamil Nadu,” the letter from the government, a copy of which is with The Telegraph, stated.