In my previous blog, I had focused on a framework aimed at improving the governance of elementary education in India. One key aspect of this framework is budget and resource management, which serves as an important route to strengthening social accountability: the more efficient and transparent public education expenditure, the better the delivery of education services to beneficiaries. As readers of this blog are already aware, the PAISA survey is a method of tracking public expenditure and resources in the education sector, down through the various levels of bureaucracy, aiming to pin-point exactly where there are leakages and hurdles. In this blog, I highlight some of the ways in which I’ve seen states and districts monitor their own expenditures within the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and suggest complementary methods of monitoring and evaluation to enhance financial management within the programme.

To cite an example from Bihar, conversations with the Management Information System (MIS) Officer at the Bihar Education Project Council revealed that each month, the districts are ranked according to their monthly SSA expenditure. Ranking is roughly based on the proportion of the budget spent each month on various line-items, as outlined in the Annual Work Plan and Budget (AWP&B). What is intriguing about this practice is that regular written feedback is provided to the district administrations, which not only contains a list of the top-ranking districts in the state, but also highlights (for each district) the line-items for which fund utilisation is falling below par and needs to be augmented. Moreover, additional funds are not transferred until a minimum percentage of the previous instalment has been spent; for instance, at least 70% of the instalment for the civil works line-item.

The above practice then appears to serve two purposes: 1. it becomes a way to establish benchmarks for the districts, in a way allowing them to “compete” with each other; 2. it communicates to the district administrations that the state officials are regularly monitoring their activities and expenditures, creating an incentive to perform well. However, the state-level administration “guiding” the districts in such a way runs the risk of undermining the ability of the districts to take important spending decisions on their own, with management processes that are essentially executed in a top-down fashion. While this monitoring process presents itself as a simple and effective way to gauge district spending, it remains incomplete since:

• It does not measure the level of real decision-making powers at district and sub-district levels;
• It does not assess in detail the impediments to the actual delivery of educational services in each district; and finally,
• Data is not readily accessible or available for public scrutiny, making it harder for citizens to monitor financial (or even other) progress of the programme.

In contrast, such data is more readily available in the case of Madhya Pradesh (MP), for instance, where a comparatively more transparent and advanced financial management information system (FMIS) is in place. MP does not rank districts like Bihar and nor does its monitoring process include the assessment of decision-making powers or impediments to service delivery. However, it does keep track of how much each district is spending every month (and quarter) as a proportion of allocated and released funds. Monthly expenditure reports (MER) of all districts are compiled and uploaded online regularly on the MP Education Portal, as are all related Government Orders and other official documents. MP’s commitment to increasing transparency and information flow on a real-time basis is thus commendable and other states would do well to replicate a similar FMIS.

Yet, expenditure monitoring practices in both states also demonstrate that the current focus is only on inputs and outputs within the sector, i.e., how much was allocated and how much spent on providing elementary education. At present, there does not appear to be an assessment of the quality of services provided, nor of the extent to which they actually meet the needs of the beneficiaries. The needs of the hour, apart from greater transparency of data, are tighter – and participatory – monitoring and evaluation of expenditures and truly devolved powers of decision-making, so that more efficient spending and greater accountability can be enforced.

Current financial monitoring practices and mechanisms can be strengthened in several ways:

1. Institutional monitoring can be enhanced as part of larger institutional reforms, which ensure that clear-cut functions are outlined at each level of the administration, with appropriate funds and resources for each functionary – who is given adequate monetary and non-monetary incentives to perform well.
2. A results-oriented system can be created with evaluations that focus less on inputs and processes, and more on targets, setting benchmarks for improved financial performance.
3. Audits, both internal and external, can be enforced more stringently.
4. Tracing fund flows through efforts such as PAISA can be complemented with the implementation of other citizen-centred monitoring and evaluation strategies, such as through citizen report cards (CRC) and social audits. On the one hand, CRC’s are a means for the public to rate the quality of services delivered and their findings can be easily linked with the institutional management and incentive systems, as was done in Bangalore at the turn of the century. On the other, social audits provide citizens the opportunity to together evaluate the performance of public officials and elected representatives, and hold them accountable for it. While social audits have been held most widely in Andhra Pradesh (AP) and Rajasthan under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), they are now also to be implemented for a number of other Centrally Sponsored Schemes, including SSA[1]. However, reports from various parts of the country reveal that, by and large, there is still great resistance to this form of monitoring of SSA, with government agencies reluctant to share information.

Thus, there is a whole range of tools and means available for improving financial and resource management in public education and enhancing governance in education at large. However, the ball is in each state government’s court to exercise political will to institutionalise these tools and strengthen accountability in the sector.

[1] For analyses of AP’s experience of conducting social audits to assess the implementation of NREGA and the Public Distribution System, see here and here.