Archives: Blog

Accountability News Update – 16 April 2010

A fortnightly round up of accountability news and views from around the world.

UK: Web-inventor calls for government data transparency
The inventor of the World Wide Web talks about the need for countries to open up and make public data accessible to all citizens.

Pakistan: Access to information now a fundamental right
The Right to Information is now a fundamental right in Pakistan following the insertion of Article 19A in the Constitution via the 18th Amendment Bill. Under article 19A, “Every citizen shall have the right to have access to information in all matters of public importance subject to regulation and reasonable restriction imposed by the law.”

US: Calls for ‘YouTube’ of Government data
US Technology Chief, Vivek Kundra has encouraged technology developers to create a ‘YouTube’ of government data in the US. The tool would enable people to “slice and dice” data to create mashups and web applications to reveal new patterns and carry out analysis.

UK: New Anti-bribery legislation comes into force
A new Bribery law in the UK heralds a clampdown on large UK businesses making payments to officials overseas to facilitate business, say experts. The new act has introduced an offence of corporate failure to prevent bribery. It is the first time such a law has existed in the UK. It also requires companies to have “adequate processes” in place to prevent such offences.

Canada: Delays leave access to information rights ‘totally obliterated’
A recent report on the performance of Canada’s Access to Information Act flags chronic delays as a serious impediment to citizens trying to access information. The report, entitled Out of Time, documents the extent of delays and identifies factors contributing to them, based on an assessment of how 24 federal institutions responded to access to information requests in 2008-2009. These institutions account for 88 percent of the requests Canadians submitted that year.

Brazil: Congress passes Right to Information Bill
The Lower House of the Brazilian Congress has approved a draft bill on the Right to Information. The RTI Bill now awaits approval by the Senate and if passed will give effect to the right to information enshrined in the Brazilian Constitution of 1988.

What gets measured gets done – but about outcomes?

Nirvikar Singh’s recent piece on Janani Suraksha Yojna (JSY) (see link) is a welcome call to address the ‘social determinants’ of health. The causes of the causes, so to speak, of illness and mortality, like education, environment and income are indeed key indicators of women’s health status and survival.

Specifically regarding JSY, however, most evaluations miss one critical issue: the quality of services. While JSY promotes institutional delivery for a woman through a financial incentive, there is no guarantee that she receives the proper services that she deserves. In fact, most JSY-used facilities are overcrowded, often with more than one woman sharing a bed.
Accountability mechanisms rightly focus on the question of inputs – are funds being disbursed – but what measure of the recipient’s care? The true measure of JSY’s success will be to see if more women are actively seeking care before, during and after delivery from a properly equipped institution. And more critically, do they receive quality care?

If we are to look at the larger issue of gendercide and ‘saving India’s women’, we must look much further than institutional delivery. The deeper accountability issue is if women can access basic health services, well before pregnancy. For example, I find that gynecological infection is the most common health complaint amongst SEWA’s members across 9 states of India. Yet if they try, women cannot access basic treatment at the primary or block level in most parts of rural India. Gynecologists are not posted, pap tests are not available, and laboratory diagnosis for reproductive tract infections is unheard of – leaving women with expensive private care or none at all. Even she is undernourished, hemoglobin testing, food supplements and iron pills are limited to pregnant women.

Thus by the time a pregnant woman interacts with the public health system under JSY, the underlying causes of maternal mortality have long taken root. After her 24 hour delivery stint at the hospital, she is likely to remain far from institutions, at least until the next delivery.

To truly improve women and mother’s health, primary women’s health services – health information, nutritional support and gynecological care to start – must be available at the local level. In addition to the ASHA worker, we have a legion of dais highly skilled at providing women with doorstep health services. Though a pregnant woman may travel long distances for a delivery with a financial incentive, she certainly cannot sacrifice a day’s earnings for primary care. Locally available health care will promote her overall health status, which of course also equips her for a safer delivery at an institution if she chooses. And when she does seek that care under JSY, she must be entitled to quality.

Sapna Desai is Health Coordinator for the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) Bharat, a national federation of women workers across 9 states.

RTE sparks a centre-state row: We want your views!

India made international headlines last week with the official enactment of Right to Education Act (RTE) guaranteeing the right to free and compulsory education to every child between the age group of 4 and 16 years. But barely a week after it was passed by Parliament, the RTE has been mired in an intense debate over centre-state relations. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Mayawati has led criticisms of the RTE, arguing that the new law puts an immense implementation and fiscal burden on already cash strapped states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. A number of states including West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Bihar and Punjab have voiced similar concerns about how they will fund the RTE.

The current exchange of barbs and criticisms across party lines highlights an important question: in an increased era of centralization, where policies are designed by the centre but implemented by states – where do states find the resources to fund and implement such massive programs? And who is ultimately accountable for how these programs are rolled out on the ground? Who is answerable for how monies were spent, progress made and targets achieved? These questions are not restricted to the RTE but apply to the broader package of social reforms including the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, National Rural Health Mission, Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission introduced by the government in the last few years.

What do you think? Write in and share your views with us.

Who Cares About Outcomes?

I had almost forgotten, till I saw a copy at a friend’s office yesterday, that every year in Parliament’s budget session, apart from presenting the annual budget, the Government of India tables an outcomes budget where every ministry reports on its outcomes. Remiss as I was in forgetting, I can’t be blamed, entirely. The outcomes budget was launched amidst much talk of reform in 2005 by then finance minister P Chidambaram. In a promising budget speech, he said ‘I must caution that outlays do not necessarily result in outcomes’. ‘The people of this country,’ he went on to add, ‘are concerned with outcomes’. And to his credit he launched the outcomes budget. In its short five year existence, the budget has been nothing but a damp squib. So valued is the outcomes budget that it never makes even the inside pages of newspapers and if you want to look for them on line – well best of luck to you.

What went wrong? Well, like many things in government, the idea is a good one but its implementation nothing short of poor. There are two critical elements to a successful ‘outcomes budget’. First, it requires the identification of clear, concise and quantifiable outcome indicators. These indicators need to be tangible and realistic. Here the outcomes budget falls short. Indicators are vague – the health ministry describes ‘funding of institutions’ and ‘widening of surveillance mechanisms’ as some of its key outcomes- making measurement impossible and irrelevant.

Second, for an ‘outcomes budget’ to achieve results it must be accompanied by increased information on performance against these indicators. The Finance Minister emphasized this at the launch of the outcomes budget, by pointing out that the objective of the budget is to put critical data on expected outcomes in to the public domain and allow for public scrutiny. On this count too, the outcomes budget has fallen far short of expectations. The budget itself was launched with much media fanfare but over the years it has simply disappeared from the public radar. There is no evidence of any proactive effort by government agencies to generate and disseminate information on progress.

In today’s Mint, Sanjiv Misra, former member of the 13th Finance Commission made some interesting observations about the failure of the outcomes budget. He points out that for reforms like the Outcomes Budget to be successful it requires the “establishment of countrywide performance benchmarks and costing norms for the public goods and services supplied; development of measurable performance indicators for the objectives set out; development of performance monitoring systems to regularly collect data on the actual results achieved; independent third-party evaluation of major programmes; and use of performance contracts to enforce accountability of key actors.” He so argues for the need to link performance on outcomes budgeting with pay.

The interesting thing about India today is that we have all these design instruments in place and we speak the right ‘speak’. Everyone in Government from the highest to the lowest agree that outcomes matter. Everyone in Government from the highest to the lowest agree that these need to be monitored and that he failure to do just this is the cause of our persistent poor performance on human development. Everyone in Government from the highest to the lowest has some interesting ideas on how to address this problem. As we speak the cabinet secretariat is running a seminar on performance oriented monitoring in the civil services. In fact the performance management wing of the cabinet secretariat has signed a significant number of contracts with Government of India departments to performance criterion and goals and there are some whispers about introducing pay for performance measures. At the same time the planning commission seems to be moving towards setting up the Independent Evaluation Office and a few months ago, PMO set up a delivery monitoring unit. There is also much talk of using technology through the UID and other instruments to develop a transparent expenditure information network that will allow for transparency and regular tracking of government funds. All of which have the potential to address the problems reforms like the outcomes budget faces. But for these instruments to take effect, we need political will – and that as we all know is sadly missing. What we need now is not more instruments but a better understanding of how to circumvent this lack of political will and push for change.

Yamini Aiyar is the Director, Accountability Initiative.

Social audit under JNNURM

Under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, is planning to include social auditing in its Basic Services for the Urban Poor (BSUP) and Integrated Housing and Slum Development Programme (IHSDP) Schemes. Under both the schemes a number of housing and infrastructure projects are being undertaken across the country. The projects are large and a huge amount of money is spent on creating such infrastructure. A social audit pilot of BSUP and IHSDP schemes was conducted in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh and Ganj Basoda, Madhya Pradesh. To take forward the social audit process, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation has developed detailed Guidelines and Methodology for conducting Social Audits, a Handbook on Social Audit, a Training of Trainers’ (ToT) manual on social audit for BSUP & IHSDP schemes.

US introduces Public Online Information Act

The US has recently introduced a bill, the Public Online Information Act (POIA) which will make it mandatory for all government departments to publish all publicly available information and data online. This includes information on the personal financial interests of high level government officials; reports of instances when executive branch travel is paid for by third-parties; reports disclosing lobbying activities by government contractors and grantees made in connection with winning a grant. If enacted, the POIA would make it mandatory for executive branch agencies to make all publicly available information online in a time bound and user friendly manner within three years of the bill being enacted. The bill also includes the setting up of a panel to bring together all branches of government create guidelines for information sharing. Click here to read more.

Assam to Guarantee Right to Health

Assam became the first state in the country to introduce a bill guaranteeing the right to health and well-being. The state government tabled the Assam Public Health Bill, 2010, in the assembly on March 12, 2010. The bill, will be put to vote on March 31.

The bill proposes to make it compulsory for both government and private hospitals to provide free healthcare services and maintain appropriate protocol of treatment for the first 24 hours to an emergency patient. Whether the state has the capacity to fulfil these promises may be debatable, it is certainly true that Assam has a long way in achieving this target.

We highlight the positional matrix of Assam related to health sector in the following graphs. (Figures are taken from lok sabha website).





Sruti Bandyopadhyay is a Research Associate with Accountability Initiative

Launch of the Right to Education Portal

A new Right to Education Portal has been launched by the Centre for Civil Society, as part of the RTE Coalition created to nurture a democratic space where each coalition partner and interested citizen will be able to strategize and contribute as to make universal elementary education a reality in India. The focus is on the Right to Education Act and its implementation at all levels. To access the portal click here

ADB Report: Ensure Transparency and Enforce Accountability

“Implement priorities , monitor results, ensure transparency and enforce accountability” – that is the message of the Asia Development Bank’s 2009 report entitled “India 2039: An Affluent Society in One Generation”. The report talks about the need to rethink what the government does and how it does it. It specifically highlights seven facets of governance which are critical to the transformation of the Indian economy and society:

  • Create a smarter, more focused, agile and more credible government.
  • Retool the civil service to meet the needs of today and tommorrow.
  • Focus on the long term and open the public-private dialogue.
  • Support competitive markets and prevent capture of state organs.
  • Inculcate a code of self-discipline and ethical behaviour within the business community.
  • Implement priorities, monitor results, ensure transparency and enforce accountability.
  • Reverse the deterioration in political governance.

Its Our Money, Where’s it Gone? Social Auditing in Kenya

In Kenya, members of parliament receive approximately one million dollars per year to spend on development projects in their constituencies through a scheme called the Constituency Development Fund (CDF). However, with no system to hold them accountable, MPs spend these funds as they like and the CDF is plagued with corruption. Drawing on the experience of social audits in India, a civil society organisation, MUHURI is helping local slum dwelling communities in Mombasa investigate how their local CDF is being used. In a fascinating documentary “Its Our Money, Where’s it Gone?”, the International Budget Parternship presents the story of MUHURI and the transformative power of social audits in helping local communities hold the government to account.