For the last couple of months, majority of us at AI, including me, were busy with a survey of around 450 government schools spread across 4 districts in 2 states. The objective of the survey was to track the flow of food grain and flow of funds to schools under the Cooked Mid Day Meal (CMDM) scheme. The fieldwork is now complete, and the survey sheets are in the process of being readied for data entry.

The CMDM scheme is supposed to provide cooked mid day meals to all children in government and government aided schools. If implemented properly, the scheme can potentially play an important role in attracting kids to schools thereby reducing the number of out of school children[1]. By improving the nutritional intake of the children, it can have positive effects on their health and cognitive abilities. But my experience, albeit lasting only a few days, tells me that all is not well when it comes to implementation. I came across a number of schools where CMDM was not provided, not just on the day of the survey, but also for long periods ranging from a week to a month, in the past.

In order to get a sense of why this might be the case, I started looking at the monitoring mechanisms put in place in these districts/ states. Here are my preliminary thoughts on existing monitoring systems, and how they can be improved.

Currently, there are two ways in which data on CMDM delivery is being generated. Every school maintains an MDM register.  The head master (henceforth, HM) or the concerned teacher are supposed to record quantity of food grain received and spent during the month, number of kids benefitting every day (and hence in a month). In addition, states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have also initiated an Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS), wherein an automated telephone call is made to the HM on each working day, who keys in the number of students who benefitted from CMDM on that day[2].

The first method has an obvious drawback- since the registers are maintained manually at the school level, information about a particular school or the block/ district is not available in real time. This problem is solved through the IVRS. However, the key problem in both cases is that the information is collected from the HM/ teacher in charge of CMDM, whose actions are likely to be governed by their own incentives. And hence, even if the IVRS says that 100 kids were given the CMDM in a particular school on a particular day, there is no guarantee that it actually happened. In fact, fudging of data at the school level is a major problem, and none of the above methods can deal with it. The only way it can come to the light is when the block/ district officials visit the school. But even then, how will they verify whether school actually provided meal to whatever number that has been stated in the MDM register or through IVRS, for say, the last week? No way!!

So we need a system which allows us to collect data in real time, and more importantly, from the ultimate beneficiaries, i.e. kids or their parents.

Let’s consider an IVRS system, which makes telephone calls not only to the HM but also to randomly selected parents of children enrolled in every school in the state, and asks the following questions:

a)      Did your child attend the school yesterday?

b)     If yes, did your child receive MDM yesterday?

If the MDM menu for the day before consisted of roti, daal and green vegetable, the next set of question can be as follows:

c)      Did he/ she receive roti?;

d)     Did he/ she receive green vegetable?

e)      Did he/ she receive daal?)

All these questions can be answered as either YES or NO. The respondent can accordingly, key in the numbers.  Consequently, data is made available in real time and more importantly, from the beneficiaries and not from the service providers. Further, data is available for every school, from which aggregate (say, block, district or state) numbers can be easily computed.

This system has a number of advantages.

a)      The responses of HM and parents can be compared to see to what extent they differ from one another.

b)     Since calls are made to random parents every day, collusion between HM and a select group of parents (say, School Management Committee members) becomes difficult.

c)      Since information is available for every school, one could devise a rule which specifies which schools are to be monitored more closely. Just to give an example, a rule could be formulated which says  that a school where more than 50% parents reported not receiving MDM for two days in a row should be visited by the block official.

d)     Putting in place such a rule will also make it easier for the district/ state officials to evaluate the performance of the block/ district officials.

e)      The system won’t cost a dime to the respondent (either in money or time spent in responding). Further, as mentioned, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have already set up an IVRS, so for them, there would be hardly any additional fixed costs. And my sense is that the marginal cost of making calls to parents as well as of storing additional data is unlikely to be prohibitively expensive.

It goes without saying that the entire data should be available in the public domain, so that everybody knows which schools is doing a good job, whose performance have deteriorated etc.. Putting the information in the public domain will help the press, civil society activists and local representatives to build pressure on the administration to take action against non-performing HM/ block official/ district officials.

One possible hindrance in implementing such a scheme is lack of connectivity, especially for poorer parents. But Census 2011 numbers reveal that more than half of the households (rural and urban combined) in India have mobile phones- 47.9% in rural areas and 64.3% in urban areas. And with the central government planning to give cell phones with Rs. 200 worth talk-time to all the Below Poverty Line (BPL) families, this problem might just disappearJ.

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[1] See http://www.isid.ac.in/~pu/conference/dec_10_conf/Papers/RajiJayaraman.pdf. In fact, research shows that providing cooked meal might be more beneficial than providing rations. See http://www.isid.ac.in/~fafridi/doc/mealsandparticipation.pdf

[2] http://www.accountabilityindia.in/article/policy-brief/2404-case-study-interactive-voice-response-system-based-daily-monitoring-system