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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Plug the hole in the bucket by Santosh Mehrotra
Thanks to the Right to Information Act, 2005, and also the activism of NGOs and of the media, a culture of accountability is growing in the country. That is the good news. However, the media, NGOs and RTI activists can only do so much. They can focus the attention of the public and parliamentarians on egregious scams, but rarely address the systemic flaws that result in leakage of funds.

We have a long history of publicly funded welfare programmes. If programmes are well-designed, they will be more effective in reaching the poor and leak less. But most developed economies that have effective programmes that leak little also have a system which monitors, evaluates and redesigns programmes to improve effectiveness. The trouble is we do very little of the first two and so end up repeating past mistakes. All that happens is that the names of welfare programmes change when a new government comes to power - with very little fundamental change in programme design.

The classic examples of this problem of history repeating itself are all the wage-employment creating public works programmes that India has been famous for in development literature. We have had an over 40-year history of such programmes, but it was not until the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in 2005 that we finally had a well-designed programme that reached the self-targeted beneficiaries, minimised leakage and has had a major impact. Prior to  NREGA, we had a plethora of programmes that fed the contractor-petty bureaucrat nexus. They resulted in some infrastructure but neither generated the scale of employment that was needed, nor raised market wages in rural areas or stemmed large-scale migration as NREGA has succeeded in doing. It is not suggested here that NREGA has not faced leakage of funds - at times on a large scale - but these are largely the result of failures in implementation, not failures of design.

For failures of design to be discovered, there is a need for programmes to be monitored well - using an online, publicly available management information system (MIS) - so that they generate data that programme managers in central ministries can then use to provide feedback to the state governments implementing these programmes. However, of the 14 flagship programmes of the central government, only eight have a publicly accessible online MIS. Moreover, there are well-known issues about the authenticity of the data these MISs provide to the central line ministry. In addition, there are issues about the speed with which the data reaches the ministry from block level.

One outcome of this state of affairs is that the prime minister's office created a delivery monitoring unit in 2009 to run an MIS on the flagship programmes.

In any case, monitoring systems can only generate a limited amount of information on inputs (e.g. financial resources released and spent) or processes. An MIS gives the manager very little information about outputs (e.g. number of tanks constructed), let alone outcomes (e.g. quality of school learning). Those who implement programmes also need information on such indicators, especially to understand whether their programmes are having the outcomes originally desired. Even more importantly, they need rigorous evaluations once every few years (usually five years) to be able to check if the programme spending is having the desired impact.

However, we have only one organisation in the country that specialises in doing evaluations, the Planning Commission's Programme Evaluation Organisation (PEO). It used to have 15 offices around the country soon after it was created in the 1950s; that number is down to 10 even though government spending has gone on increasing, both in absolute terms as well as a share of the country's GDP. Since the number of staff in the PEO engaged in evaluations has been dwindling, most evaluations have been outsourced to NGOs or research institutions. They may or may not know the difference between regular social science research and a programme evaluation that is meaningful to policy makers or programme implementers.

State governments don't particularly seem to be interested in evaluating their own programme efficiency, and have not built up any capacity in the field of monitoring or evaluation. So we have a situation where a culture of acceptance of poorly designed or indifferently implemented programmes has thrived - a culture in which leakages of programme funds are also accepted as a given.

It is in this context that the central government announced the creation of an independent evaluation office in the president's speech to Parliament. The cabinet has just approved its creation. It has its task cut out. It will first have to ensure that monitoring systems are built up in every central government line ministry, and then in state government departments. It will then have to ensure that data collected through such monitoring systems are authenticated and validated so that they are reliable tools for management and more effective implementation of programme objectives. It will then have to develop training to build capacity to conduct evaluations generally, and impact evaluations in particular - since there is very limited capacity to conduct rigorous evaluations in the country.

Finally, and most importantly, it must take the lead in conducting evaluations itself, and encourage others to undertake such evaluations, especially of large-spending flagship programmes - so that the bad design of programmes can be discovered and flaws corrected, before funding is released the following year.

The writer is director-general of the Institute of Applied Manpower Research.