Blog Archive - Page 109 of 130 - Accountability Initiative: Responsive Governance

Before Data Analysis Begins…

Finally, the PAISA District surveys are over! The Jalpaigudi survey has just been completed; the filled, checked and rechecked questionnaires have now reached us. It took us 4 months to cover 140-145 schools across 9 PAISA districts[1]. Quite an exciting and eventful few months, I must say! It gives us a great sense of achievement that within a period of 5-6 months, we took a huge leap from conducting small pilots in one block of our PAISA districts to surveying 140-145 schools spread across the entire district. We are now in the process of analysing the data.

I have observed that researchers who work with secondary data often don’t realize the extent of effort that go behind creating data sets which are being used to perform tabulations and regressions. A neat looking data file is a culmination of a long process which can stretch literally to a few months to couple of years, depending on the nature and scale of data collection. Our experience bears this out.

The first step was to develop a questionnaire which is easy to understand and fill, and at the same time, capable of collecting information at the level of detail we needed. It involved thinking carefully about PAISA questions, arguing over how many questions to include, which questions to include and how to phrase them, extensive piloting in the areas where the survey would happen, incorporating the feedback from these pilots, and not to mention, endless tinkering with questionnaires to get it just right[2].

The next step was to figure out when the surveys were to be conducted. As Anirvan has rightly pointed out in a previous blog, it’s not as easy as it sounds[3]. Then comes the hard part, which tests a PAISA Associate’s (PA) mettle- that of mobilizing enough volunteers capable of conducting the survey properly[4]. Given the scale of the exercise, this was very crucial. We tried different models in different places – in Nalanda, Purnia (Bihar) and Satara (Maharashtra), we had relatively more volunteers and hence less schools per volunteer. In Udaipur (Rajasthan), we had few volunteers and thus, more schools per volunteer. Both methods have their pros and cons. The ‘more volunteers’ method is useful when the survey questionnaire is not very complicated and the window of time to complete the survey process is quite narrow. But training and coordinating a large number of volunteers is not an easy task. On the other hand, when there are fewer surveyors, they can be trained thoroughly, can be monitored rigorously and coordinated easily. This is especially useful when the survey questionnaires are complex, and schools need to be visited more than once.

We also made sure that there was extensive monitoring and rechecking at various levels to ensure accurate and truthful data collection. The Master Trainers (MTs) and the PAs made surprise visits to some schools where the survey was being conducted to ensure that the surveyors were indeed there and were collecting data the way they are supposed to[5]. Just to give an example, one of our PAs found that the surveyors were filling student attendance column based on what the HM was saying, rather than conducting a headcount. The mistake corrected in time. In addition to spot-checking, the PAs and MTs visited a sample of schools after the survey to cross-check the information that was collected. When the questionnaires were submitted, the MTs and the PAs went through each one of them carefully to spot errors, missing fields if any. The surveyors were also asked a few questions to make sure that they had indeed been to the school. It did not stop here. Some of the head-masters of the schools were contacted again via telephone, and were asked if the surveyors had visited the school. They were also asked a few questions from the questionnaire and their answers were cross-checked against the submitted questionnaires.

Once all the questionnaires were submitted, the PAs prepared a ‘master file’ for each district, which had an exhaustive listing of all the nomenclatures for a particular entity. For example, a school management committee could be mentioned as SMC, Parent Teacher Association (PTA), Vidyalay Shiksha Samiti or some other local name. The master file has all such possible combinations. This makes data analysis a tad easier. This was the learning from the pilots we conducted in December 2010.

Once the master file was prepared, the questionnaires came to Delhi office where another round of rechecking took place. Only then were the questionnaires sent for data entry.

Data entry can’t begin without telling the data entry firm how to enter the data and that requires defining data structures and creating a code book. A codebook specifies variable name(s) corresponding to each and every question in the questionnaire, the format in which it is to be entered, and gives codes in cases where the answer can be one of the multiple options. We have created a ‘flat’ data format and defined around 2000 variables. The code book, the master file and the questionnaires were then handed to the data entry firm.

The data entry firm scans all the questionnaires before entering the data. We have opted for ‘double’ entry i.e. the firm employs two separate teams to enter the data simultaneously. Once both teams finish data entry, the data sets are compared. If there are any inconsistencies, the original questionnaire is checked and data set corrected accordingly. The firm then hands over the data set to us.

But wait….that’s not the end of the story. We then check the data set for any mistakes in data entry. And this is where the scanned formats come in handy. After 4-5 days of intensive data ‘cleaning’, the data is finally ready for basic statistical analysis, which is the stage we are at now. The analysis itself can make for another blog-post. But that will have to wait.

[1] PAISA Districts are the districts where the PAISA project is being implemented. They are Kangra (Himachal Pradesh), Jalpaiguri (West Bengal), Nalanda & Purnea (Bihar), Jaipur and Udaipur (Rajasthan), Sagar (Madhya Pradesh), Satara (Maharashtra), and Medak and Hyderabad (Andhra Pradesh). We did not conduct field survey in Hyderabad.

[2] PAISA questions are- a) do schools get their money?, b) do schools get their entire entitlement, c) when do they get money?, d) do they spend it?, and e) what do they spend money on? The answers to these questions throw a light on problems in fund flow processes.

[3] http://www.accountabilityindia.in/accountabilityblog/2323-pot-luck-field

[4] PAISA Associates (PA) work at the district level- one PA for each district.

[5] The PAs trained the Master trainers (MTs), who in turn trained the surveyors in the survey questionnaire.

Call for applicants – Bihar Rural Development Society

The Rural Development Department of the Government of Bihar has set up an autonomous society – the Bihar Rural Development society (BRDS) to help guide in the implementation of rural development schemes. The society is committed to eradicating poverty, promoting sustainable development and productive employment and fostering social justice for rural residents.

The society is now looking to build a self-motivated and committed multi-disciplinary team to carry out its program. Attached to this blog post are the details of all the positions and the application process. Interested people can directly apply.

Law schools and pre-legislative debate

A couple of years ago, during a convocation ceremony at my alma mater, Nalsar University of Law, a National Law University, P. Chidambaram, the then Union finance minister, posed an important question – why were law schools not involved in the debate regarding the interpretation of the Civil Nuclear Liability Bill?

The same question can be asked today of the Lokpal Bill. This question becomes even more pertinent with increased talk of deficit in pre-legislative scrutiny in light of the government’s attitude towards the Jan Lokpal Bill (See Tarunabh Khaitan’s piece on the same). The following question thus arose in my mind – how are law schools informing pre-legislative debate? The question arose during a conversation with a colleague, who I thought made a very valid point about the disconnect between law students and several others watching the debate on the Lokpal. (Though risking a generalization, the arguments made by the former have more to do with the language of the varied drafts and the pragmatism of achieving goals envisaged in the Jan Lokpal draft by way of legislation, in light of previous experiences. The arguments made by the latter centered around the idea of anti-corruption and bribery, and not that much attention was paid to details in the text of the various bills). There is certainly a growing feeling that most of us who spend a fair amount of our time in law school, learning about the nuances of statutory interpretation and the Constitution, are yet to make our presence felt in the debate.

Much has been said about how law school recruitments indicate that lawschools have failed to do what they were set up to do, which is to act as a feeder channel for the bar and the bench and are instead a feeder channel for transactional law firms and corporates. Another oft raised issue is with respect to legal education and the ‘research culture’ of these institutions. While not delving into important questions of how and why this happened, it interests me, as a product of one of these institutions, to examine whether it provides a space, during the course of the undergraduate program, for contribution to public discourse on legislations in the making.

Yes, law students in Nagpur organized a symposium on the Lokpal and presented opinions on the same. Yes, law students participate in the draft legislation analysis competition held by PRS. Alumni from National Law Universities setup the Pre-legislative Briefing Service which has sent comments and research papers to ministries seeking suggestions on legislative drafts, for example, on the Torture Bill and the Civil Nuclear Liability Bill. But how many law students on a regular basis contribute when suggestions are sought by Ministries on draft legislations?

I chose three law schools to examine- 1) Nalsar University of Law, Hyderabad 2) National Law School India University, Bengaluru 3) National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata (My sources are three current students of these universities. I’d be more than happy to know more about what’s happening, and alter this table if required)[1]

	Do any of these programmes make curricular space or devote credits to legislative drafting?	Has there been a discussion with regard to any of the versions of the bills on the Lokpal	Are research centres, associated and based out of these law universities involved in assisting with the drafting of legislation ?
NALSAR	Three credits are assigned to a course titled‘Judicial Process and Legislative Drafting’. Typically students opting to pursue the latter, have to draft a statute of their choice in a research paper.	Had a discussion on the Lokpal Drafts on August 21st ( The debate began earlier this year)	Yes. For example, the Centre for Disability Studies associated with Nalsar University has been associated with the working Committee of the Ministry of Social Justice and Environment on the new disability law.
NLSIU	No course of the kind exists	Their ‘Law and Society Group’organizes discussions of similar kind. However, they were yet to initiate a debate on the Lokpal issue, .	Have been part of drafting consultations.[2]
NUJS	No course of the kind exists	Not yet.	Have been part of drafting consultations

What emerges is that only one of these law schools provides for a course in legislative drafting. Secondly, faculty members and research centres are involved in the drafting of other legislations from time to time. With respect to the debate surrounding the Lok Pal Drafts, only one law school had organized a discussion on August 21st ( also very late in the day), and other law schools have not yet done so.

My point is not that law schools must spend more time analyzing the Lokpal Bill, it is that a space must be created in these schools for an informed engagement with legislative drafting. We all agree that an informed debate must ensue. Informed, certainly, by those learning the significance of every punctuation, and conjunction in these legislations-in-the-making.There is a back and forth that should necessarily be part of the exercise of legislative drafting and it is necessary that more actors contribute to this consultative process, and that such contribution is not limited to stray instances listed earlier.

[1] This information dates back to 24^th August, 2011.

[2] I’m awaiting information on the same.

Pot luck from the field

At the outset, please allow me to be honest: I ran out of topics to write on. So while scanning for inspiration (and low hanging fruit), I took the most common recourse by looking at previous blog entries. And the good thing is that I didn’t have to look very far! In a previous post, Yamini had written on some of the team’s experiences in the field. Here, in what was intended to be a shorter entry, but sadly failed in its ill-conceived attempt at brevity, I’ve written about some incidents that befell me in the field, some related to the survey, some not.

Planning a survey, as my colleagues will tell you, is a lot of work. I have mercifully been spared till now but these days, I sense, are about to come to an end. While the pilot survey in Jalpaigudi (in December 2010) may have underlined the importance of knowing the academic year (it coincided with examinations in primary schools), Nalanda and Purnea showed that the academic year can vary by district as well. Furthermore, some schools in Kangra follow a separate academic year from other schools within the same district! So, finding a two week stretch during which all schools in a district remain open is not an easy task by any stretch of the imagination. Apart from academic years and national and state government holidays, Jaipur illustrated that we had to take the marriage season into account as well! The buck doesn’t stop here – there are a number of random shocks, for instance, who would have thought that the Rajasthan government would declare a two day holiday to mourn the death of the Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh (no disrespect intended) or that Telengana protests would break out in Medak district of Andhra Pradesh one day after the start of the survey? But I dare say that nowhere was it so unpredictable than Jalpaiguri district of Pashchim Banga, as I found out to my frustration during the annual survey in August 2011.

By virtue of the fact that no one in the team (apart from yours truly) understands Bangla, I have had the privilege of overseeing the PAISA survey. The survey was to start on August 8, a Monday . But little did we know that Mamata di would declare a holiday on the occasion of Rabindranath Tagore’s death anniversary and earmark the next two days for cultural activities. The original intimation was that schools would be working on August 9, but at the last minute we received information that would be a holiday as well! The confusion doesn’t stop there though – it appears that some headmasters decided that they were the bosses of their own schools and decided that Tuesday would be a working day, come rain or shine, thus we ended up with a mix of open and shut schools and no idea which was which. To add to our woes, another bandh was declared on Friday and roads were blocked in some regions as a part of protests by tribals. So, to summarize the events of two random weeks in Jalpaiguri:

Date	Event
August 02	Bandh
August 03	Working
August 04	Working
August 05	Working
August 06	Saturday
August 07	Sunday
August 08	Holiday
August 09	Cultural celebrations
August 10	Cultural celebrations
August 11	Working
August 12	Bandh
August 13	Saturday (and Raksha Bandhan[1])
August 14	Sunday
August 15	Independence Day
August 16 onwards	Working (hopefully!)

Interestingly, all these bandhs seem to be called on Mondays and Fridays. It almost makes me want to shift base to (not) work in North Pashchim Banga!

Second, Sam Spad e (or Philip Marlowe if you prefer) seems to have competition as murder seems to be stalking me ever since my return from Himachal Pradesh. And nowhere was it so apparent than the five days I spent in Bihar. Yamini mentioned that we could not get financial information in some schools as some headmasters had been booked under a murder charge and consequently school accounts had been frozen; the connection however doesn’t end here. We had hired a car for a couple of days to help us monitor the progress of the survey and to recheck schools that have already been surveyed. This car came with a slightly-built, soft-spoken but unnaturally well-dressed driver sporting a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses and a nostrum in the form of a magnetic pendant. After doing a round of about four schools, we stopped for some litti chokha by the road. Drifting into small talk, I found after obtaining his drivers’ license in Delhi in the early 90s, he had spent a few years driving a bus. Now, anyone familiar with Delhi will tell you that the 90s were the halcyon days of the aptly coloured Red Line buses which had pedestrians scurrying for cover even while walking on the pavement[2]. My interest was thus immediately piqued. I was rewarded for treating him to breakfast when he told me that he had indeed driven a red line for the better part of the 90s. And as I had suspected his career in mass transportation had come to a premature halt because of a misguided moment of road rage that had resulted in the death of a traffic policeman. After spending six months in prison and paying a fine of Rs. 20,000, our subject returned to Purnea where he has remained ever since.

While our driver stayed on in Purnea, my tryst with murder was to have another twist: my next trip was to Jalpaiguri, where as soon as I landed I was greeted with the news that the master trainer training was behind schedule as a bandh had been declared the previous day and the transport system paralysed. Why? It appeared that a prominent trader had been murdered a couple of days ago and there were mass protests across Siliguri. Mercifully (and strangely), I have not had a brush with killers since I have returned to Delhi. Or so I think.

Now about some stray incidents that came to light during the survey and did not find a place in the previous blog:

Community contribution in schools: The RTE has been particularly insistent that the local community gets involved in school planning and administration to encourage greater accountability and responsiveness to local needs. So while most schools do have School Management Committees (SMCs) which include some local members to manage the daily activities of the school, the response from the rest of the community has not been forthcoming(except perhaps for distributing sweets and prizes on the Independence Day and Republic Day). In fact as one headmaster in Himachal Pradesh wryly remarked, in some cases the only “community contribution” has been the theft of toilet seats from the school! In case you thought it couldn’t get worse than this, please read on. During our survey in Jalpaiguri, I visited a school with a particularly dilapidated toilet with no seat and a crumbling wall that had been reclaimed by the local flora and fauna. On being asked as to why the toilet had been allowed to reach such a derelict state, the headmaster replied the proximate cause of the depreciation was that some villagers had needed bricks and decided the school toilet was a convenient source.
Impact on headmasters: Surveyors in Jalpaigudi have a few interesting tales to recount, Since they have been instructed to refer to passbooks and cash books when filling any information related to school grants, they have often had headmasters scurrying for cover. A feature of schools in Pashchim Banga is that a SMC (called a Village Education Committee or VEC) often looks after the day-to-day affairs of more than one school. Consequently, surveyors often have to make extra trips to get information. In December, a surveyor complained that a particular headmaster had refused to give any financial information citing that the documents were with the headmaster of a neighbouring school. But by the time, the surveyor reached the other school, Headmaster A had warned Headmaster B, who simply disappeared from the scene, in such haste that even teachers in School B were nonplussed! interestingly School A turned up in our August sample again and this time the surveyor was warned! In other cases, headmasters of schools not in our sample actually took umbrage that their schools would not be surveyed so-much-so that volunteers actually went and filled a questionnaire just to pacify them!

This then is it as far as my field experiences are concerned. As of now we have a long stretch ahead analysing the data that is pouring in from all sides. Our District Reports on elementary education will be out in October. Watch this space!

[1] Though Bengalis traditionally celebrate Bhai Dooj (or Bhai Phota as we call it), that doesn’t stop us from taking a holiday on Rakhi.

[2] The buses then fell victim to the terror they unleashed, and in an effort to rid them of the tag of “Killer buses” were painted blue and rechristened Blue Line buses. (Of course there’s more to the story, but this is what I like to believe!) But a leopard can’t change its spots, and drivers of blue line buses continued to have a free rein of the road till recently when the Delhi Transport Corporation prohibited further operations.

Participation a ‘trendy’ trend

Every once in a while a trend is born. Its genesis is almost always unclear. Nonetheless there is merit to its inception which ensures that it continues to remain in fashion and is appropriated into other contexts. The only contention however is that its appropriation is not always done in keeping with the values which had formed the basis of its initial appeal. Such however is the tragedy of trends- these seemly creatures often fall easy prey to gross misapplications.

The predicament of ‘trends’ is an affliction which has penetrated social science as well. In our famed semantics we often like to display our hipness by terming it a ‘buzzword’. One such buzzword which took root in the development discourse is the concept of ‘participation’. This concept took root around the 1960-70’s when traditional measures of accountability such as elections, audits etc, were found to have limited success[1]. Citizen’s participation in state’s activities it was felt could play an important role in strengthening accountability and responsiveness in the delivery of public services.

Like all trends, the trend of participation had its phases. The form of participation that emerged during this initial period focussed largely on consultative mechanisms such as user committees. As a result, this period witnessed the proliferation of several such committees, such as the community health councils, tenant councils, parent committees, etc. It was hoped that the increasing participation of clients in service delivery would ‘ensure fair processes and make for better decision making’ [2]

However while participation became the new discourse to describe state society relations, there still existed an ‘arms length’ type of relationship between the two. Participation of citizens in service delivery was circumscribed to the implementation of specific government programmes with measures for responsiveness limited largely to citizen consultations, and those for accountability largely to monitoring of outputs. Citizens were thereby prevented from exercising their agency to make choices outside this frame of reference. Moreover, the complexities of power-relations between service providers and community members and within communities themselves were summarily ignored. This was largely a fallout of the Weberian model of bureaucracy, which many developing countries had come to emulate. One of the fundamental principals of such a model called for the insulation of the bureaucracy from citizenry so as to maintain the objectivity of the public service[3].

In more recent years a ‘transgressive’ stream of research has questioned the above approach and has argued that accountability is best achieved in ‘cogovernance’ spaces. The idea of co-governance is linked to the notion of creating spaces for more direct citizen participation and involvement. This involves a repositioning of the notion of participation, wherein citizens engage in their capacity as actors rather than users and where such an engagement includes the formulation as well as the implementation of policies. This form of accountability has been termed ‘hybrid’/ social accountability, which is distinguished from other forms of accountability in that it breaks the state’s monopoly over official oversight and legitimises citizen inclusion into hitherto exclusive affairs of the state [4].

Indian policy makers have taken cue from this new notion of participation and inserted provisions for ensuring greater participation of citizens in the implementation of social sector programmes such as the Right to Education (RTE). The RTE in particular lays emphasis on involving communities in monitoring and overseeing the functioning of the schools. At the school level, School Management Committees (SMCs) are required to be established for ensuring the participation of parents in school functioning. In addition to being monitoring bodies these committees have also been empowered with important responsibilities which include formulation of school development plans, monitoring teacher attendance, controlling school finances and deciding on school expenditure.

However, just inserting clauses are not enough for co-governance to be achieved, as a brief study undertaken by Accountability Initiative indicates. The study, done across states, assessed the levels of awareness of the members of these committees. We currently only have data for one state, Andhra Pradesh. Below are some of the findings from our study conducted with 35 SMC members across two districts;

69% of the respondents could not describe their roles and responsibilities.
None of the members knew the total amount of money received by the school in 2009-10 or 2010-11.
83% of the SMC member did not know of the annual grants received by the school in the previous year.
28% of the members stated that the HM took decisions on how the money was spent. 10% of the members stated that the SMC as a whole took such decisions while 5% stated that the SMC president took such decisions. 58% of the members did not know who took such decisions.
69% of the members had not heard of the RTE.
97% of the members did not know which children were exempted from paying a fee in government schools.

While some may argue that these insights are quite preliminary (which of course they are), I believe that they shed interesting insights into the nature of institutional design.. Much like the stereotype, SMCs in the name of participation have been given responsibility without sufficient agency. Consequently, SMC members are required to monitor teacher attendance and teaching without being able to take any action against them in the event that they find that teachers are not carrying out their responsibilities. Moreover SMCs have not been given specific training in carrying out their responsibilities. For instance in AP 78% of the members stated that they had not received any training. Further in cases where SMC members have been trained these trainings have not focussed on equipping members with the skills to carry out their functions. A most glaring example of this problem is how SMC members are expected to make plans and oversee expenditure without any training on the manner in which plans are required to be made, the type of funds which are disbursed to the schools and the type of expenditure which can be incurred.

Thus terms such as participation by virtue of the trendiness are inserted in precious legislation without a simple care for the fundamentals which uphold and define their very meaning. The trend of ‘trends’ thus continues!

[1] Goetz, A.M and Gaventa, J. (2001) ‘Bringing Citizen Voice and Client Focus into Service Delivery’, IDS. For details see

[2] Cornwall, A. and Gaventa, J. (2001) Bridging the Gap: Citizenship, Participation and Accountability, IDS

[3] Aiyar, Y. etal (2009), ‘Institutionalizing Social Accountability: Considerations for Policy’ http://www.accountabilityindia.in/sites/default/files/working-paper/36_1255255017.pdf

[4] ibid

AWW- The life and times of Mamta Didi

Ask anyone where the Anganwadi Centre (AWC) is in Paschimi Gaon (name changed for privacy) in Lucknow and you are directed to an Anganwadi worker’s house. Its courtyard has a large mat where 15 children aged 3-6 years are sitting, playing with broken toys. The walls are covered with posters of alphabets so faded that they look more than a decade old, and the nearby hand-pump no longer works. This is Mamta Didi’s house, an Anganwadi Worker (AWW) for the past 19 years.

We were in Lucknow as part of a workshop on PAHELI – a Peoples Audit on Health, Education and Livelihoods and one of our tasks entailed interviewing AWW’s about their roles and responsibilities and tracking the amount of money that reaches an AWC.

For those who may be unfamiliar with the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme, AWC’s are the main unit of service delivery and have now been acknowledged as the first outpost of health, nutrition and early learning at the habitation level (details of the scheme can be found here and here). Anganwadi Workers (AWW) and Anganwadi Helpers (AWH) thereby are the front-line functionaries at AWC. Over time, AWW’s in the government’s own words “have emerged as the central figure for child care and development under the ICDS scheme”

And indeed, take a look at Mamta didi’s job responsibilities and you would amazed at the number of responsibilities she handles – literally covering an entire lifecycle. Even the guidelines (they can be found here) list 21 tasks that an AWW is meant to do. To give a brief idea – every year Mamta Didi’s work starts with a survey of the families in the village to keep track of the number of young children below the age of 6, adolescent girls and pregnant women. She needs to monitor the health of the adolescent girls (kishori’s), and provide them with take home ration/food in accordance with the recently launched Kishori Shakti Yojana (KSY). As soon as a Kishori gets married, Mamta didi is responsible for providing contraceptives to her and once the Kishori plans to have children, give her health advice. Once pregnant, Mamta helps the Primary Health Clinic (PHC) staff and Accredited Social Health Worker(ASHA) with conducting the ante and post natal checkups and then provides the pregnant and lactating mother (erstwhile Kishori) with rations. Once the baby is delivered, she assists the family in birth registration. In addition, she assists the local PHC staff in a myriad of activities including organization of immunization camps and health checkups, measurement of height and weight of children, provision of counselling to caregivers and organization of non-formal pre-school activities. Mamta Didi’s work thus goes much beyond the responsibility of providing nutritional support to children and mothers.

And then there are the registers – a task in themselves!

The Government of Orissa’s Women and Child Development website (link here) for instance pegs the number at 14 registers. These include a family survey register, daily stock register, an immunization register, daily diary, growth monitoring chart, a supervision-cum-visitor book – the list goes on. In addition, the AWWs are also expected to maintain Monthly Progress Reports capturing information ranging from population details, births and deaths of children, maternal deaths, number of children who attended AWC for supplementary nutrition and pre-school education, nutritional status of children by looking at their age appropriate weight, information home visits by AWW etc. These progress reports are meant to be sent to the officers in charge on the 5^th day of every month. (For more details on the monitoring mechanisms, see here)

Given the extent of their responsibility, one would imagine that a lot of attention is being paid to the AWC, but that is definitely not the case. To give a few examples:-

1) Infrastructural Facilities: Most AWC’s continue to run from the house of the AWW, with no compensation given to her. While the guidelines mention a rent allowance, during our field visit, no one had heard of such a thing. Most AWCs further lack adequate drinking water and toilet facilities – a fact admitted even by the Minister of Women and Child Development in a reply to a question in the Lok Sabha, when she said, “the Government has information available in respect of 11.13 lakh AWCs/ mini-AWCs in 33 States/UTs according to which 57.48% AWCs have drinking water facilities within the premises and 6.61% AWCs have toilet facilities.” (link available here). Similar findings have been found in evaluations conducted by NCAER and the Planning Commission amongst others and their findings can be found on the ICDS website itself.

2) Kits and small items: While the guidelines mention that a medicine Kit, Pre-school Education Kit, Joint Mother & Child Protection Card, Growth Monitoring Chart and other Petty items such as tumbler, bucket, mug etc. are to be provided to each AWC every year, they usually do not come.

3) Finances: Some of the grants mentioned in a government notification include contingency grants for each AWC, Monitoring and Evaluation grants, monies for replacement of registers, weighing scales etc @ Rs. 200 per functional AWC, a flexi fund of Rs. 1000 per AWC for activities like transportation of ICDS beneficiaries requiring urgent medical care, local innovations, etc. However not ONE of the AWCs we visited had ever heard of the flexifund scheme nor received any such grant. Instead the only thing the AWC had received was a cupboard, a chowky, a medicine kit (of which many medicines had now expired) and a weighing scale many years ago.

4) Food and Rations: The AWC is meant to provide both dry take home rations as well as hot cooked food – the ration of which is supposed to come on a regular basis. However, even this does not come regularly. In the AWC’s we visited, while the dry ration had come the rations for the hot-cooked meal had not come for the past 2 months!

In such a situation, it is hard to imagine how an AWW carries out her many responsibilities, that too at a minimal salary. But there is some hope. Effective from 1^st April 2011, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs finally approved the enhancement of Honoraria for Anganwadi Workers to Rs.3000/- from Rs.1500/- per month and for Anganwadi Helpers and Workers of Mini-AWCs to Rs.1500/- from Rs.750/- per month. However, when we had visited Mamta didi in end of May, she and her helper had not even received their previous honorarium of 3 months!

Yet, when you ask her about how she feels to be an AWW, she smiles proudly showing off her recently received “badge” and uniform (a sari worth Rs. 200) and says, “Don’t I look professional- please take a photo!”

Singham: Restoring the roar of the Indian Police

Recently, I sat through 3 hours of a movie by Rohit Shetty called Singham. Dubbed a retro-kitsch movie by Times of India, the movie has nonetheless gone on to become the second highest revenue-earner of this year. Clearly, the movie’s simplistic storyline of an honest policeman’s fight against the forces of corruption and political interference (epitomized in the character of Jayakanth Shikare) has touched a raw nerve with the public.

Before we launch into an analysis of what’s going wrong, it would make sense to estimate the extent of rot in the Police system. The Transparency International (India) corruption Study of 2007 has damningly singled out the Police services in India for their ‘alarming level’ of corruption involving BPL households. It’s estimated that the poorest households of our country pay Rs 2,148 million to the police as bribe in a year!

But what is the cause of such blatant corruption? Is it that the police force is morally bankrupt? Or is there a deeper rot: an institutional or an incentive flaw, or a flaw in the separation of powers that has led to this state of affairs? Some of the dialogues in the movie have captured the underlying issues in a way that only popular culture can.

Take for example the constable’s lament “…Kya aukad hai hum logo ka. Kuch nahi! Saala jo sheher ki poori raksha karta hai, day and night, uska pagaar corporate company me kaam karne waale jhaado waale se bhi kam hai (What is the status of a constable! While he is the one who protects the city day and night, his salary is less than that of a sweeper in a corporate company. )Over-the-top, you say? Rest assured, it’s not. Various commissions who have worked on police reforms, have pointed out the low salaries of constables and the limited promotion avenues open to them as reasons for a highly unmotivated and corrupt force.
But why has the constabulary in India been treated so unfairly? The reason can be traced back to the 1861 Police Act, which envisioned a highly mechanical job for them, requiring absolutely no exercise of intelligence on their part. So entrenched was this attitude that even a 1902-03 police reform Commission refused to increase their pays saying “In regard to Constables, the Commission are of the opinion that the proposals made by some witnesses to double or treble their pay are due to forgetfulness of the principle that the more important and responsible duties of the police ought not to be entrusted to this class of officers…. Constables are not a suitable agency even for the performance of the beat duties ordinarily entrusted to them.” It was the 1977 Commission which sought to reverse this opinion in its first report, and suggested radical pay-revisions & changes in the promotional structure within the police system so that Constable could rise up the ranks. However, till today the situation remains grim. Only a few states have enacted laws which enable constables to be promoted, leaving the rest to rot in a life of stagnation and low salaries.

“Tere ko kya laga, tere transfer order ke arzi pe aye he tu? Galat!! Jaykanth Shikare ke marzi se aaya hai tu… Me tujhe yahaan laya jahaan minister log mere peeche aur police log mere jeb me rehte hai!” (The villain to the police officer – What did you think? You came here on your request? Wrong! You came here because I wanted you to come here where ministers follow me around, and policemen are in my pocket! )A research paper titled “Political and Administrative Manipulation of the Police” brought out by the Bureau of Police Research and Development in 1979 had warned of the unholy nexus being formed between politics, police and crime in our country. In fact, the paper had warned that there’s a great need to depoliticize the force if we need to maintain the accountability of police forces to the rule-of-law and not to the ruling party.
The question that needs to be answered is why are the police not able to push back against this political involvement? The reason again goes back to the 1861 Act. Through this Act, the police forces in India are accountable to civilian bureaucrats and ultimately through this bureaucratic chain to the government. The Act does not allow for any accountability to the citizens. The political class in India has taken advantage of this and manipulated the police-force to their advantage. Upright and dedicated police officials are easily brought to heel by frequent and untimely transfers and postings to inconsequential positions. Untimely transfers could have been stopped if a minimum tenure was guaranteed for an officer, but the Act does not allow that. Is it then any wonder that police themselves start appeasing the local politicians more than following the rule-of-law?

There are a number of other issues that are plaguing the Indian Police, issues especially pertinent to accountability which I won’t go into now.The common thread running through all of them is the Police Act of 1861. This ruler-centric law passed in the aftermath of the 1857 revolution, was meant to consolidate the power of the British rulers in India. Consequently, all its provisions were meant to promote accountability not to the rule of the law and the citizens, but rather to the ruling power.

Even after independence, this law was not amended or replaced by the states. Time and again, various commissions (National Police Commission in 1978, Ribeiro Committee in 1996, Padmanabhaiah Committee in 2000, Justice Malimath Committee in 2003 and the Soli Sorabjee Committee in 2006 amongst others) had pointed out the necessity of changing this law and had even come up with Model Police Acts. However, despite so many recommendations, states refused to take up police reforms in any substantive way. Finally, the Supreme Court intervened and issued its own directives in 2006. These directives, a subset of the recommendations by the various committees were

Setting up of a State Security Commission: to ensure that the State Government does not exercise unwarranted influence or pressure on the State police and for laying down the broad policy guidelines so that the State police always acts according to the laws of the land and the Constitution of the country.
Minimum tenure of 2 years for a DGP
Minimum Tenure of 2 years of I.G. of Police & other officers
Separation of Investigation: The investigating police shall be separated from the law and order police to ensure speedier investigation, better expertise and improved rapport with the people.
Setting up of a Police establishment Board: The board shall decide all transfers, postings, promotions and other service related matters of officers of and below the rank of Deputy Superintendent of Police.
Setting up of a Police Complaints Authority: at the district level to look into complaints against police officers of and up to the rank of Deputy Superintendent of Police. Similarly, another Police Complaints Authority to be set up at the State level to look into complaints against officers of the rank of Superintendent of Police and above.

A monitoring committee is now monitoring the implementation of these directives by the various states. A report card from 2009 shows that sadly, but perhaps not unsurprisingly, not many of the States have complied with these provisions. In fact, even when they have complied, for example, by setting up of the Police Complaint authority, these have been set up in a slipshod manner. For example, functioning of the Complaints authority in Uttarakhand has been critiqued here.

Ensuring that our police function in a fair, just, non-corrupt, accountable and citizen-centric manner require reforms at various levels: strengthening of the law, strengthening of law-related institutions such as the police, courts, prisons etc. and finally ensuring compliance with the law. India is still at the first step of reforms, it’s still struggling to ensure that the law governing the Police itself is just & fair and has inbuilt accountability mechanisms. The Supreme Court directives on Police Reforms were in the right direction in the absence of any state initiative. However, it’s not enough. Police reforms require political will-both at the top and more importantly at the citizen-level. The current debate on corruption has opened up a space. Now it would do well for us to include police-reforms in its discussion-agenda.

Will the Right to Food Increase Nutritional Status of Poor Households?

I recently came across two very interesting papers by Robert Jensen and Nolan Miller, where they discuss the effect of providing price subsidies on essential food items to poor consumers. I find the papers particularly interesting in the context of the recent discussions on the ‘Right to Food’ and the ‘National Food Security Bill’. These debates thus far have mainly concentrated on the following aspects- 1) whether food security should be provided through ‘in kind’ subsidies or cash or some other mechanism 2) the cost implications of each of these mechanisms and 3) feasibility of this mammoth responsibility being carried out by the moribund PDS system and the ill-equipped administrative machinery.

These papers throw a light on a completely different and more fundamental question- even if adequate subsidies are provided and are properly implemented, will the intended beneficiaries consume in the quantities we expect them to? And consequently, will these subsidies improve nutrition?

This approach, thus, questions the very basis of ‘Right to Food’/ ‘National Food Security Bill’- that poor people (more specifically, ‘poor’ people) are not consuming enough since they lack purchasing power. Thus they have to reduce their consumption involuntarily.

Intuition

The basic intuition is quite simple. Let’s assume that there are two goods- staple food (like rice, wheat) and a ‘fancy’ good (like meat, sweets). The staple food offers a high level of calories at low cost, while the fancy food though tasty and hence more preferred provides fewer calories per unit of currency. The poorest consumers will eat a lot of staple food to obtain required calories and other nutrients. The leftover money is spent on buying the fancy good. Thus, a higher fraction is spent on staple food. Now assume that a substantial price subsidy is provided on staple food. What would be the implication?

The subsidy reduces the cost of staple food, which free up substantial funds which can be spent in myriad other ways-this is the wealth effect. If consumers care for non-nutritional aspects of food (like taste) in addition to nutritional ones, the effect of subsidy will depend on how consumers substitute among food (or between food and non-food items). If substitution towards less-nutritious food is large enough, consumers might in fact consume less nutrition than before. Thus, there is no straightforward prediction that subsidies will definitely improve nutritional outcome for poor consumers.

Experiment

Jensen and Miller conducted a field experiment in Hunan and Gansu provinces of China in 2006, where randomly selected households were given vouchers entitling them for price reduction ranging from 8% to 30% on staple items- rice in Hunan and wheat in Gansu. These were ‘urban poor’ households as defined in China. On average, 70% of their calorie consumption came from staple food such as rice and wheat.

In addition to standard income- expenditure survey and household demographics, each household member completed a 24-hour food recall diary, in which the respondents were supposed to note everything they ate or drank the previous day, whether inside or outside their house, by specifically listing the components of all food eaten. Data was gathered in three rounds- April (before the experiment began), September (during the experiment) and December (after the experiment was over).

Results

The results are astonishing- whether it is calories, protein, minerals or vitamins- subsidy doesn’t seem to have any impact on consumption of these nutrients. If anything, the subsidy seems to have negative effect but it is not statistically significant. Results differ slightly if we look at two provinces separately. For Hunan, the coefficients for all the nutrients are negative (though significant only in case of calories thus indicating decline in calorie consumption). In Gansu, the coefficients are positive for calories and protein, and negative for minerals and vitamins. But again, none of them are statistically significant.

So even in the situation where the subsidy is properly targeted and up-take is universal, consumption of nutrients has not improved, even for these poor households.

In fact, they show that if

a) households are poor enough that they face subsistence nutrition concerns, and

b) households consume very simple diet, including a basic (staple) and a ‘fancy’ good, and

c) the basic good is the cheapest source of calories, comprise a large part of diet/ budget, and has no ready substitute, and

d) households can’t be so impoverished that they consume only the staple good,

then it is very likely that lowering the price of staple food would cause households to reduce their demand for that staple food (i.e. positive relation between demand and price as against usual negative relation between the two)

Implication for Right to Food Act

What does this mean for ‘Right to Food Act’? The Act is supposed to provide a minimum of 7 kg of food grain per person per month, at a price not exceeding Rs. 3 per kg for rice, Rs. 2 per kg for wheat and Rs. 1 kg for millets for ‘priority’ households. For ‘general’ households, the provision is for minimum of 4 kg of food grains per person per month, at a price not exceeding 50% of the minimum support price.

Assuming good implementation, these price subsidies will generate huge wealth effects. Further, the conditions mentioned above are applicable for a significant fraction of households in India, who are the intended beneficiaries of this act. Then it is not unimaginable to have a situation where the households are not consuming enough calories (compared to the norm) as it is happening today, even after the implementation of ‘Right to Food Act’.

References

Jensen, Robert and Nolan Miller (2010), “Do Consumer Price Subsidies Really Improve Nutrition?”, NBER Working Paper 16102.

Jensen, Robert and Nolan Miller (2008), “Giffen Behavior and Subsistence Consumption?”, American Economic Review, 98:4, 1153-1577.

National Food Security Bill, 2011

Notes from the field: Implementing the PAISA survey

We are now entering the final lap of the PAISA surveys with only one of our nine districts (Jalpaigudi) still to go live. While it will take us a few months to analyze the data (watch out for the district studies that should be out in October 2011), the process of conducting the survey itself has given us a glimpse into the bottlenecks and successes of the everyday administration of elementary education. Here are some snippets from the field.

Between marriage seasons, the summer heat and the rains – there’s always a reason for teachers and children to skip school: We scheduled our PAISA surveys between April and July 2011. This, we soon discovered is the worst time to conduct a survey (and more importantly the worst time for teaching) because teachers and students are rarely available in schools!April, in many states, marks the start of the school year and teachers are tasked with meeting enrolment targets (which for many states, is the primary goal of the Right to Education). In practical terms this means- that teachers spend the first few weeks of the new school year doing house visits during school hours. Enrolment targets apart, this is also the time when exam papers (exams are usually held in March) are evaluated and once teachers are done with their house visits they tend to spend the rest of their ‘teaching’ time evaluating exam papers. Keeping this in mind, we postponed our survey to early May in the hope that we could complete our data collection work well before schools close for the summer holidays.
Rajasthan was our first stop. But we soon discovered that finding teachers and students in schools in May is not easy either. May is peak wedding season in Rajasthan and children and teachers are busy attending weddings not schools! And that’s not all. We also discovered that national events can also result in school closure. In the midst of the Rajasthan survey, the PAISA team woke one morning to discover that the state government had declared an official holiday because the Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh had died unexpectedly in a helicopter crash!

Bihar had a different problem. The State had scheduled Panchayat elections in May and all the teachers were busy on ‘election duties’. And just when the elections finished and schools began to resume their normal schedule, the summer heat kicked causing the Bihar government to close schools two weeks earlier than planned.
Schools rarely open on time: Back in the day, when I was a school going kid, I spent many a morning running around the football field as punishment for showing up late (not that it ever deterred me). Turns out rural school going children in India don’t have that problem because schools rarely open on time. In Bihar, to beat the heat the government set school timing between 6.30 am -11.30 am. But once we started our survey we discovered that that 6.30 am was far too early for teachers and schools actually opened somewhere between 7.30 or 8 am. 6.30 am is unreasonably early, you could argue but our experience in Madhya Pradesh showed that teacher punctuality (or lack thereof) has nothing to do with school timings. In Madhya Pradesh, schools are officially meant to open at a rather reasonable 10.30 am. But in many instances when the PAISA team reached schools at 11.30 AM, to find children playing in the fields waiting for their teacher to show up!. Anecdotes suggest that school timings seem to depend on the distance teachers had to travel to get to schools – making, to my mind, a strong case for local recruitment and para teachers.
Beware, your headmaster may be under trial for murder: In Purnea, Bihar, my colleague Anirvan Chowdhury faced a unique problem. PAISA surveyors couldn’t get grant information in many schools because the headmasters were under trial for murder and their accounts were frozen! In other cases, newly appointed headmasters complained that their predecessors had “bungled” the school accounts and all official/bank documents had mysteriously vapourised; robberies were the excuse given although one wonders why these so-called thieves rifled through school cupboards! Anirvan is now trying to figure out how to code ‘HM under trial’ and ‘school robbery’!
A truly mobile office: Murder trials apart, in all the districts surveyed, PAISA surveyors had difficulty accessing passbooks and cash-books (a important part of the PAISA survey). This was not surprising. After all, given the lack of transparency in the system why would headmasters be willing to share financial information with our surveyors? But on talking with surveyors we discovered the problem wasn’t unwilling headmasters but unavailability of documents – in more cases than less, the Head Masters (HMs) keep school related documents at home! One of our surveyors rather aptly summarized this-: “The HMs’ he said, ”take their office home”.
Whose right is it anyway? What does it mean to implement a ‘rights’ based program as opposed to a scheme and how is the idea of a right interpreted by a bureaucracy steeped in a guideline driven, input focused culture? This question has intrigued me and in my travels during the survey, I asked this question to every school teacher I met. With almost no exceptions here is the answer I got : (I paraphrase) “It gives us leverage over parents. Now that there is a law, we tell parents they have no choice but to enroll their children in schools.” An interesting interpretation of a right that was meant to empower people not teachers! This response confirmed to me that our current systems are simply not designed to deliver on a ‘rights’ framework and there is a real need to re-think how our bureaucracy is structured if we want the idea of a right based delivery system to transform citizen-state relations in this country.
Headmasters spend a lot of time at funerals: This might seem close to the absurd, but we found that HMs in Bihar spend a disproportionate amount of time attending funerals. In a number of schools that we went to the head-master was on leave. In each of these schools, the head-teacher in charge claimed that the leave was for personal reasons. This seemed reasonable. So we asked them for the headmaster’s phone number and told them we’d be back in 2-3 days. As soon as we declared our intent of coming back, the head-teacher would claim that the headmaster’s relative had died and that he would come back for duty only after 1 or 2 weeks. The first place we went to, this seemed believable. But by the 4^th school we were scratching our heads and wondering if there was an epidemic related to passbooks!

But in all this chaos and confusion, there are things that work.

To take an example, surveyors said that the scholarship and uniform scheme run by the government of Bihar is working very well, and that unlike the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, corruption and leakage in it was relatively low. According to the surveyors, these schemes work because the entitlements are handed over during public meetings and the public nature of this process acts as a deterrent to corruption.

But above all a sense of government and community ownership towards a scheme/programme matters most. While monitoring the PAISA survey in Bihar, Abhinav Nayar a summer intern with AI documented the Mukhyamantri Balika Cycle Yojana– an incentive scheme launched in 2006 through which girls who have completed standard VIII (Middle school) and enroll in high school are given a cash award of Rs. 2,000 to buy a bicycle. The scheme now has been extended to boys as well. Allegations of corruption have been few and far between (there are a few cases where eligible girls haven’t got their bicycles but this is attributed to administrative hiccups and not corruption) and in most cases eligible girls have used the money to buy only bicycles – not something you’d expect. Abhinav’s field work pointed to one important reason for this – girls and their parents take pride in owning the bicycle. Girls play with their bicycles during recess – in fact, the bicycle parking-space is now the ‘hang out’ spot. So valued is this possession, that Abhinav was left wondering about the peer pressure on girls who haven’t yet received their bikes.

In Satara, Maharashtra, I came across a school where a group of motivated teachers had started music lessons for children and encouraged parents to contribute to the day-to-day functioning of the schools. Parents had bought furniture for the school – in fact this was one of the only schools I’ve been to in the district which had desks.

These stories hold many lessons. For one, greater transparency, as we see in the case of the scholarship and uniform programme can help redress corruption. But transparency alone is not enough. People need to have a sense of ownership toward a programme as they do in the cycle case and in the school I visited in Satara. How do we take these isolated experiences and scale them up to the rest of the country? How do we get every parent to feel a sense of ownership over the school, to engage and participate in the school? This is the challenge of the future.

Why we don’t need this Lokpal Bill

The Lokpal Bill 2011 is finally before the Parliament. This is a good time to question whether the taxpayer should be forced to bear the burden of creating this behemoth of an institution or whether its objectives can be met through alternative policy prescriptions. Now is a good time for a regulatory and judicial impact assessment of this proposed law.

Though a norm in better run governments elsewhere, assessing the need for legislations and the costs of enforcing them is not how we pass laws in India. Then we fret that our laws don’t give us the outcomes expected of them. Both the Lokpal/ Jan Lokpal Bills, despite their well-aired differences, essentially seek to establish an institution to enquire into acts of corruption by public servants. Both agree on the powers to investigate and facilitate prosecution of offenders under the Prevention of Corruption Act. Both seem to address issues like having special courts, declaration of assets by public servants, attachment of assets, etc.

Yet neither convinces on the need for yet another Ombudsman in the anti-corruption framework or talks of what’s to become of the existing one once the Lokpal comes into being. The Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) is already doing or at least superintending a significant part of what’s put on the plate for the Lokpal by both parties, including administering the Whistleblower law. If this law passes, the CVC will end up merely heading the administrative vigilance machinery advising and monitoring departmental proceedings of Group A officers of the Central government and the CBI, minus the anti-corruption work, will have lost its raison d’etre.

All the reasons which defeat swift investigations and prosecution of the corrupt like prior permission for investigation, sanction for prosecution, special courts, asset declarations, grievance redressal, etc. was always within the government’s power to change. The government has now acceded to removal of some of these impediments in its Lokpal Bill though it has left out significant issues like prior permission for investigation and the Citizen’s Charter enforcement.

A principle element of a regulatory impact assessment includes the use of available instruments because for a law to be effective, it must be able to achieve the policy objective at the lowest cost to the public. The policy goals of the proposed Lokpal and the present anti-corruption framework being largely the same, why not give the existing Ombudsman institution more teeth and independence with jurisdiction over all public servants of the Union including Ministers and MPs as well as a sterner PC Act, instead of re-inventing the wheel?

None of the proponents of the Lokpal idea have done their homework on what the real consequences of the new law would be to the exchequer and particularly on the court system. While the Constitution mandates presentation of a Financial Memorandum along with the Bill to indicate the expenditure involved in implementing a new law so that budgetary allocations could be made, this exercise has largely remained a casual effort limited to the expenditure on salaries of personnel if any authority or agency is created under the proposed legislation. The Financial Memorandum attached to the Lokpal Bill 2011 speaks of Rs. 50 crores as non-recurring and Rs. 100 crores as recurring expenditure and put likely infrastructure costs to Rs. 400 crores. These figures come without any judicial impact assessment to ascertain the likely impact on the judiciary due to the enactment of this new law. For one thing is sure, every decision of the Lokpal will end in the court. The judiciary and also the public should know if there’s money in the coffers for the additional workload in the courts or speedy justice to nail the corrupt will remain a mirage. And who is going to foot the bill for legal aid to the person complained against, that laughable largesse in clause 56 of the Bill?

Energies of the proponents of the Lokpal idea and public money could perhaps be better spent if there was some honest reflection on the intent of the original Lokpal/ Lokayukta as thought of by the first Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) in 1966. The ARC had meant the Lokpal to be an institution that would redress citizen’s grievances and ensure high standards of efficiency, integrity and responsiveness in the public services. So the first Lokpal Bill of 1968 appropriately provided for creation of the Lokpal and Lokayukta “for investigation of administrative action taken by or on behalf of the government or certain public authorities” which would involve enquiring into complaints based on such actions against all public servants of the Union, including Ministers.

There is a need to distinguish maladministration and corruption. Maladministration requires evaluating the administration against stated policy goals or enquiring into complaints from the public. The aim should be to help improve policy implementation, identify possible loopholes in the law that is contributing to tardy implementation and also identify acts of corruption and recommend prosecution of public servants and others involved in it.

What we don’t have and we want is a set up like what was suggested by the ARC in 1966. The Karnataka Lokayukta Act 1984 modeled on the same ARC recommendations has just delivered a damning report on illegal mining and the people behind it. It’s mandate was to enquire into various aspects of illegal mining during a specified period, identify violations of the law, fix responsibility, identify loss to the exchequer and suggest remedial measures. If there is to be Lokpal at the Centre, let us look at the original model.