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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Evaluation office for rural development -Elizabeth Roche

Evaluation office for rural development -Elizabeth Roche

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published Published on May 14, 2013   modified Modified on May 14, 2013
-The Times of India


The new office will give real time analysis of the government's social programmes, says Jairam Ramesh

At a time when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is facing flak for a series of alleged corruption scams, the ministry of rural development that has an annual budget of approximately ` 800 billion has decided to go ahead and create an office of concurrent evaluation.

The proposal for a concurrent evaluation office (CEO) was approved by the Union cabinet two months ago. An advertisement seeking the expertise of "a renowned scholar in economics or public policy" has appeared in the latest issue of The Economist magazine.

An extended version of the advertisement on the ministry's website describes the expert who will be designated director general of the CEO as "a professional economist/public policy expert of global repute, hired through an open recruitment process led by a global search-cum-selection committee."

The new office "will give the government real time analysis" of the government's social programmes, said rural development minister Jairam Ramesh, whose office commissioned the advertisement. Such analyses "has never been done", Ramesh said. "This is an idea that should have been implemented 30 years ago. All we do are postmortems," he said, referring to studies and reports undertaken after the implementation of programmes.

Recalling that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as member of the Planning Commission, had suggested setting up the CEO in 1985-87, Ramesh said the idea was later discarded.

"We have too many forensic pathologists in this country. We need someone who can do real-time analyses and fix problems" as and when they occur, he said. According to the advertisement, the CEO is an "independent entity" being established by the ministry.

According to the government's budget documents, the government's spending on social services including nutrition, water supply, housing and sanitation, increased from `30,700 crore in 2004-05 to `1.9 trillion in 2013-14. A recent report by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India had found many irregularities in the government's flagship national rural employment guarantee scheme, a programme overseen by Ramesh's ministry that was implemented in 2006.

N.C. Saxena, former secretary in the rural development ministry and currently member of the National Advisory Council that sets the social agenda of the government, hailed the move as "a good idea given that the government spends so much on social programmes. It is important to know why they are not reaching the people, whether the programme design needs to be changed, etc.," he said. "It's important to have quality reports and it is also important that the government takes the evaluation seriously," he said.

The director general of the CEO "will distil findings from research" and "critically assess government programmes so that they deliver brighter futures for the rural poor" besides "advising the national leadership team led by the minister".
"He/she will work with both the central and state governments to drive information sharing between them-combining lessons learnt so that the ministry's programmes make the biggest possible impact.

The expert, who will have a three-year contract, extendable by two years, "will have full functional autonomy in matters of discharge of its functions", the advertisement said, adding that "a governing body chaired by a person of eminence will exercise administrative oversight and provide policy guidance".

Ramesh said the CEO will be a "lean and mean organization" staffed by six-seven people "with outstanding credentials, hired from the market" with three-year tenures, extendable by another two years. The total annual administrative budget would initially be `1.75 crore per year, to be increased every year, the ministry website said, adding that the current annual increase has been pegged at 10%. The CEO will also have a research budget to fund studies of `8 crore a year, to be increased by 10% a year every year. These budgets will be guaranteed for at least three years, it said.

"The CEO will work in tandem with the independent evaulation office in the Planning Commisison," Ramesh said. Noting that most of the current assessments are those being made by implementors of the programmes, Ramesh said that the evaluations by the CEO will be "independent" of the implementors.


Live Mint, 13 May, 2013, http://www.livemint.com/Home-Page/JV7JH5omUMaq4rJPApFj8I/Evaluation-office-for-rural-development.html


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