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Dissent Economics: Thoughts on an inclusive future

Hindol Sengupta

Accept it. Deep down, perhaps even precariously near the surface, in your heart you love the fact that being well-off is slowly returning to vogue. You heap scorn at the fashion weeks (no, you couldn’t have missed them because India had four, or maybe five this year) but you are enormously glad that someone, somewhere had enough money in India to celebrate leggy models and largely unwearable clothes so many times.

Chances are you love the fact that the downturn is coming to an end – unless you belong to India’s Communist parties and were trashed in the polls – and are delighted to know that you will not lose your job after all.

But, as Jeffery Sachs says, most likely the lessons of the downturn are fast being forgotten and no matter which way you read the alphabet soup of recovery (‘L’, maybe ‘V’, why not ‘W’?), there is little doubt that bubbles are forming once again even as the first champagne bottles, in a year and a half in some cases, are being uncorked.

So what lessons are being forgotten post the downturn?

In July, in a special issue, The Economist pointed out that how the bubble burst is fundamentally altering economic theory, arguing that macroeconomists, especially central bankers, “were too fixated on taming inflation and too cavalier about asset bubbles”.

Now, as the US economy reports growth for the first time in about a year, officially, as some newspapers have reported, ending the “longest since World War II” recession, the question to ask is what forms asset bubbles, why are they ignored and is it possible, somewhere, even at this moment, more asset bubbles are forming but there is little chance that we will know what they are until they burst spectacularly?

The downturn has brought several theories of melting pedestals of finance and macroeconomics and rethinking, more dramatically, the basis of neo-liberal capitalism. The question – many have asked – is, is capitalism now on an irretrievable collision course with the greater common good and has it now been irretrievably proved that left to itself, un-shepherded capitalism is apocalyptic?

The answer of course is yes, and yes.

In our terror-ridden world, economic and political apocalypse is, assuredly, intertwined.

If you peer closely at the debate that surrounds analysis of Wall Street greed to Maoist violence in India’s infamous Red Corridor, from terror recruits in dysfunctional, and one is being kind here, North Africa, to the new great game for oil, friction and finance are constant bedfellows.

Look closely at what India’s considers the biggest threat to the nation state these days – Maoist violence. With an estimated one-third of the country controlled continuously or intermittently by Maoists and ever increasing instances of violence, including the heavily politicised train-jacking, there is reason for real concern.

But at the heart of the battle is a deep service delivery failure. Decades of poor delivery of resources and opportunities in India’s large tribal swathes have turned them into a battlefield where argument for a different, inclusive model of development have reached bullet-point.

For evidence, listen to the latest statements of Kishenji, the ever-elusive but omnipresent Maoist chief, always shot with his back to the camera and a gun strategically slung on the shoulders (so that the gun faces the camera even if he does not) who has challenged the West Bengal government to finish development faster than the Maoists.

Among the Maoist brag: they would sink 100 tube-wells in the next month and also set up 15 temporary hospitals. All this barely 200 kilometers from Calcutta.

Rebels are doing what the government has not in 60 years.

In Peshawar, widely known as Pakistan’s (Asia’s?) Wild West, Pakistani diplomats have often told me why there is so much support for the Taliban. They bring security and a sense of the fair rule of law which the corrupt administration has always failed to deliver.

So while asset bubbles are created in one part of the world, another breeds violence devoid of basic guarantees of the nation state and the two are in constant path of collision.

There is a big common ground between conservative politics and neo-liberal economics – an almost fascist disdain for dissenting views. In India, this has meant that as the country squeezes 20 years of Western growth in two or three years, there is little space of questioning this development model.

In this arrogance of development, dissent is not merely derided, it is treachery.

The big lesson of the post-downturn debate is whether in the world of Maoist violence and terror attacks, in a world of the debris of once-great banks, can there be space for Dissent Economics?

In his prophetic essay ‘The Future of Dissent’ on the ‘Futures’ edition of India’s leading thought journal Seminar in December 1997, historian Ashis Nandy wrote:

“It is the responsibility of the citizen-futurist… to defy and subvert the ‘inevitable’ in the future, only another name for a tomorrow which dare not be anything other than a linear projection of yesterday. Students of the future owe it to themselves to create a gap between those whose idea of the future is modelled on the Wall Street share market or on nineteenth century Europe and those ideas of the future that could be called contemporary versions or reincarnations of the prophetic.”

As Wall Street alchemists now know, the future might often not be the linear projection of the histories of the past.

Through the idea of Dissent Economics, I want to argue that our collective future can be far better prophesied if space is made for dissent. Dissent Economics, formalised as part of mainstream debate, will ease radical pressures on the system and would aid cooperative negotiation that are more effective in bringing change.

How can Dissent Economic Theory be statistically integrated to mainstream analysis?

The beginning must be far away from the data charts, on the field, by allowing and indeed enabling processes bring together dissenting viewpoints into mainstream debate. Provisions such as these already exist in government programs in education, health, employment guarantee schemes etc, but need to be implemented better.

Dissent Economics seeks to understand and extract from what initially might seem to be fringe criticism of popular notions but through micro-analysis is able to extract clues and forecast scenarios that takes a more holistic picture of the future, not so much as a linear projection of the past, but the sum of total of collective experience and opinions where even a breakaway radical critique centre might be explosive enough to derail the ‘inevitable’.

Dissent Economics at its core of course is about democracy.

Hindol Sengupta is Associate Editor, Bloomberg UTV

Show Me the Money – The trials and tribulations of finding budgetary data in India

Avani Kapur

Every year on budget day, millions across the country tune into their television or radio-sets to hear the verdict of the budget. We want to know how much money has been allocated for various schemes and how the government has been fairing on its promises during the previous years. Yet, apart from that one day where basic budgetary data is clearly spelt out for us in a language everyone can understand, for the most part, anyone who has tried getting budgetary data on the social sector knows the arduous task it entails. A quick look at the Ministry of Health Website gives a clear indication of this!

As part of my work at the Accountability Initiative, I have been involved in trying to collect and disseminate information on social sector expenditures (see here). The importance of understanding social sector budgetary data becomes relevant by the quantum of money that it involves. The fact that the Indian economy has been growing at an incredible rate is a well-known fact. And this has been accompanied with large increases in social sector spending. According to the Economic Survey of India, Rs. 2,39,340 crores was spent in 2006-07 (the latest year for which actual expenditure figures are available) on Social Services including health and education. But how much of this actually reaches the service provider?

For the most part, tracking expenditure through budget documents requires an understanding of the expenditure responsibilities within and across Central and State governments. Budgets usually involve codes and although since 1987 budget codes have been harmonized, the process and documentation of budget-making has not kept pace with the changes over the last two decades.

Broadly there are 4 places to look for budgetary data, but each comes with its own set of limitations. One of the first places to look for budget documents is the Central Government’s dedicated budget website- www.indiabudget.nic.in. However, while the detailed demand for grants provides the Revised Estimates (RE) and Budget Estimates (BE), the final accounted expenditure is not available. Second, there is the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), which gives information about the amount of money allocated under different sectors and states, but here too, there is no detailed information on how, and on what, the money is being spent.

In order to get details about expenditure one needs to go to a separate document called the ‘Finance Accounts’, which is not easily available online. Moreover, there is a 2 year lag in reporting, i.e. for 2008-09 financial year, actual expenditure is available only up to 2006-07.

Similarly, while budget documents of the State governments and relevant government ministries do provide actual expenditure, they are not always publically available online and even when they are, they are not easy to navigate as there is no standardization in the presentation of budget documents across states or departments along with the time-lag problem already mentioned.

Apart from the difficulty in finding information, even if the information is available, there are problems of different reporting styles, lack of reliable and up-to-date information.

To take the example of education, while the RBI reports it under the budget head of ‘’Education, Sports, Art and Culture’’, the Central Government budget website puts education under the head of General, Elementary, Secondary and Adult Education. This makes it difficult to know which is the right source and the data naturally doesn’t match, making cross-verification difficult.

Moreover, for social sectors such as education, there may be multiple departments delivering the service. For example, in Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh, schools in tribal-dominated blocks come under the domain of the Tribal Welfare Department. This means that the total expenditure for education is generally higher than the expenditure incurred by the Department of Education.

The problem is further intensified in cases where fiscal responsibility is devolved to the lower levels of government. Significant portion of grants coming from the Centre go directly to the panchayats through the State budget. While the State budget documents mention the quantum of block grants to panchayats made by various departments, they often do not mention the purpose of the grants. Moreover, the lack of documentation by the Panchayats along the lines of a national system of accounts makes reconciling the grants coming from the Centre and the State, with panchayat records, virtually impossible.

The lack of regular and reliable data is evident from the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan Web Portal wherein, till date, expenditure under the various heads is only available up till January 2009. There is also no way of knowing when the website would be updated .

In the absence of a centralised information database tracking, the allocation and expenditure of funds (even for the government) becomes an extremely tedious exercise, having implications for planning as well as efficiency. The (often) big difference in revised estimates and budget estimates indicates that there are problems in the planning process, often caused by the inability to incorporate the spillovers of unspent funds. According to estimates, more than Rs.50,000 crores that were committed to flagship programs such as Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, National Rural Health Mission etc, in previous years, are lying unutilized.

A centralised information system would assist in mitigating this problem by catching mistakes and inefficiencies and also ensuring transparency.

With the advent of the Right to Information Act (RTI), we now have a legal duty to provide information including budgetary information. Section 4(2) of the RTI, calls for the proactive disclosure of information of public authorities and mandates, “it shall be the constant endeavour of every public authority….. to provide as much information suo moto to the public at regular intervals through various means of communication including the internet, so that the public have minimum resort to the use of this act to obtain information”. Websites such as the Andhra Pradesh Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (APREGS) website, with its well-organised and up-to-date information for various heads right up to the mandal level indicate that creating such a system is possible. Now it is time we step up to the challenge!

Avani Kapur is Researcher and Coordinator of PAISA project at Accountability Initiative

Thoughts on Types of Accountability

Nirvikar Singh

In the context of governance, accountability means that members and agents of government, i.e., politicians, employees and contractors are ultimately answerable to the citizens who provide the funds for their functioning, through taxes, fees and loans. Therefore, persistently poor public expenditure quality and inefficient delivery of public services, beyond what can be attributed to unavoidable constraints placed by financial and human resource limitations, must be traceable to weak accountability mechanisms operating for individuals (politicians and government employees) and for organizations (ministries and various public sector enterprises). Weak accountability also is central to the problem of corruption, which contributes to poor quality of public services.

Accountability is implemented through the provision of appropriate incentives for performance. For most of government, incentives and accountability are quite indirect, operating through organizational hierarchies. Only politicians are directly answerable to citizens through elections, and these are based on aggregate and incomplete assessments by citizens of politicians’ performance. Day-to-day accountability of politicians works through mechanisms such as the answerability of the executive to the legislature, the oversight of the judiciary, and general checks and balances within government. A federal structure adds the electoral dimension of accountability to subnational governments, but this can complicate the task of citizens in trying to assess performance.

To elucidate, one can categorize two fundamental types of accountability in governance: (1) that of elected officials to citizens and (2) that of other government employees to elected officials. The first can also be termed accountability through “voice”, political accountability or external accountability. Voice typically works through the electoral process, but one can also view direct appeals to the judiciary as a form of voice. In India, the broad use of public interest legislation can be seen as citizens’ using the judiciary to improve accountability of politicians, where electoral accountability is weak. An additional mechanism that provides external accountability is what Hirschman termed “exit.” Citizens may exit in two ways, either by shifting jurisdictions, or by going to the private sector for fulfilling wants that the government fails to provide adequately or effectively. In either case, the key enabler of exit is competition, between jurisdictions or between public and private provision.

The second type of accountability is more complex, since there can be vertical and horizontal chains of accountability within government as a whole, and within specific parts of government. Thus, this type of accountability includes “hierarchy” as a mechanism as well as checks and balances within government. One can also term this as “internal” accountability, broadening the standard usage of that term, which focuses on internal hierarchies, to include checks and balances.

Checks and balances are ignored in analysis that treats government as a dichotomous entity of elected and non-elected officials and neglects the broader dimensions of within-government accountability. For an example, consider the functioning of the Indian national parliament as an institution of accountability for the executive – its role in practice is weak, though it is supposed to have this function.

In considering forms of accountability, public interest legislation can also be interpreted as a hybrid of external (government-citizen) and internal accountability. One can possibly also distinguish “social” accountability, referring to the accountability of front-line service delivery units of government to clients. It seems that this is really a derivative of joint political and internal accountability. Yet another aspect of accountability is a division along quasi-functional lines: political, fiscal and administrative. Again, it seems that fiscal accountability, while very significant, is a joint product of political (external) and administrative (internal) accountability.

Nirvikar Singh is Professor of Economics at University of California, Santa Cruz.

Annual Forum of the UN Solution Exchange Decentralization Community, October 2009, Lucknow

Bala Posani

The Annual Forum of the UN Solution Exchange Decentralization Community was held this year between 22nd and 24th October in Lucknow. It was attended by 135 participants from 23 states, among whom were elected representatives from Panchayats in 15 states across the country. I had the opportunity to attend the forum, and in this post I have summarized my takeaways from it.

Solution Exchange (SE), is an initiative of the UN Agencies in India to harness the power of Communities of Practice to help attain national development goals and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Decentralization Community of SE is facilitated by the UNDP and connects practitioners across the country working on Decentralization and Local Governance in India, providing them a non-partisan platform, helping them share and apply each other’s knowledge and experience, thereby increasing the effectiveness of their individual efforts.

The theme for this year’s Annual Forum was ‘Rights and Local Governance’. This was in consideration of the rights based framework within which various new initiatives of the government like the Right to Information Act, the Right to Employment, the Right to Food Security, and Access to Justice through Gram Nyayalayas have been conceived. The theme was timely and important, as all of these have direct implication for the local governance as local governments have a major role to play in realizing the objectives of these initiatives.

The plenary session on Day 1 had engaging talks centred on the ‘rights and local governance’ theme. Prof Meenakshisundaram, (Former Secretary, Ministry of Rural Development) spoke about how, so far, the local governments in India have not been recognized in practice as any real ‘unit of governance’, and how the increased role for them in the rights-based service delivery framework might help bring that recognition.

Mr. S.M. Vijayanand (Principal Secretary, Department of Local Self Government, Kerala) talked about the theoretical implications of the rights-based framework. He said that this kind of framework by definition involves a ‘covenant’ between the government and its citizens. On the one hand it recognizes citizens’ agency in asserting it, and on the other, forces the government to intervene in cases of non-compliance by making it a violation of a legal right.

Dr. S.C. Behar (Former Chief Secretary, Government of Madhya Pradesh), drew attention to the urgency of efforts to scrutinize and make suggestions to the Right to Education Act, the details of which are being formulated currently. He pointed out that even though in the new framework the funds are to be shared between the Centre and the States, there is yet no consensus on how these funds are going to be raised at these levels. He also suggested that local governments must go beyond their duties of governance and take up advocacy as well, to ensure that higher levels of government live up to their promises.

Dr. N.C. Saxena (Former Secretary, Planning Commission), spoke about the Food Security Act, and its three aspects – availability, accessibility and absorption, and pointed out how Panchayats have a rather limited role in all of these. He said that we must think beyond the 3Fs (functions, functionaries, and funds), and work to build Panchayats as institutions. Panchayats need to be able to generate their own revenue, which would foster responsibility and make them more directly accountable to the people. He also suggested that indicators need to be developed in health, education, nutrition etc., and Panchayats need to be graded along these indicators, and funding could be made contingent on these grades. He gave examples of ICDS in Himachal Pradesh and Education Programmes in Chhattisgarh where such indicators have been implemented. Also, citing the example of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly which met only 25 days in a year, he pointed out that the MLAs seem not to be interested as much in their legislative duties, as they are in doing more visible things like spending the MLALADS money, and sharing in the implementation of local level programmes – something which is the mandate of lower tiers of government. To reduce the conflict that this might create between the MLA and the Sarpanch, he made a pragmatic, if adventurous, suggestion of merging the MLA with the Block Presidency.

Following the plenary session, there were parallel sessions on the different working groups on rights and local governance, namely the Rights to Information, Education, Employment and Food Security, and Access to Justice. I attended the RTI session, in which some interesting suggestions came up on how Panchayats can improve transparency and proactive disclosure of records in their villages. One suggestion was that one day in the week could be designated when all the Panchayat records would be made available freely for anyone t o come and inspect. Nikhil Dey of MKSS cited the example of Delhi where this practice has been successfully implemented for the PDS records. Another suggestion was to designate a day in a month when a ‘local secretariat’ would be conducted where representatives of government department would come to the Panchayat office with the current records pertaining to the village, which would be open for inspection by anyone in the village. Steps like these, it was felt, would not only improve the transparency and ease of access of information, but also consolidate the importance of the Panchayat as an institution, as it requires the bureaucrats from higher levels of government to come there and be answerable every month.

Day 2 had sessions where we got a chance to hear from the elected representatives from different states about their experiences of running a government at the local level. There were also women representatives from Goa, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Among other things, many Sarpanches spoke about their desire for public service which motivated them to contest the elections, and their everyday experience of being in office. They also spoke about the difficulties of dealing with the bureaucrats at the higher levels. Day 2 also had presentations by members on selected themes of decentralization like ‘Land, Water and Empowerment’, ‘Urban Governance’ and ‘Local Governance – the Way Forward’.

An interesting feature of Day 2 was the ‘Knowledge Mela’, which was a highly interactive way of learning from experiences. Members could walk around 6-10 tables and meet Resource Persons to network with and understand themes/topics that he/she was presenting. The themes ranged from gender equity in Panchayats, teaching local governance as an academic subject in higher education to climate change and local governance and capacity building through technology. There was also some discussion on how to take the Decentralization Community forward, and how to decentralize the decentralization community itself, so that there was greater ownership and diversity of voices from the local levels.

Forums such as these provide an important opportunity where policymakers, elected representatives and practitioners from local level, researchers and academics share a common platform. This enables a rich discussion full of perspectives from different stakeholders in governance, especially the practitioner perspective from the field. The 73rd and 74th Amendments may have set in motion the possibility of making governance meaningful at the local levels, but it is through deliberations and learnings from forums such as these that we can keep the momentum of reform going, so that local government is not just an electoral reality but also a substantive, capable, and responsive government for the citizens.

Bala Posani is Senior Research Analyst at Accountability Initiative

Experiences from the Bhilwara NREGA Social Audit

Abhijit Patnaik

The NREGA guarantees certain rights to all workers – 100 days work to each family in a year, full pay for full work, unemployment insurance if work is not given in the first fifteen days after applying, work within 5km of the village, the right to inspect employment registers and muster rolls at the panchayat office being some of them.

The recently concluded Bhilwara NREGA Social Audit Padyatra involved over 1600 Block and district resource personnel from all over Rajasthan, NGO workers and other volunteers from different parts of India including Orissa and Mizoram. The Social Audit has become an important means through which people can get involved in the planning, execution and monitoring of various aspects of the law. The experience of implementation of the law over the last three and a half years has shown that people’s involvement is crucial to the better implementation of the law and people’s ability to access their entitlements.

The 4 day training period involved explaining what the teams were supposed to do during the audit, a day of ‘’shramdhaan’’ involving physically working on NREGS worksites (in our case- digging holes ) to experience firsthand the effort involved in earning Rs.100 a day, distribution of teams (125 in all), speeches by representatives of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangatahan (including Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey) and the Government of Rajasthan on the importance of the NREGA for the rural poor and the Audit and how we were supposed to go about conducting it .The entire exercise was made possible by the cooperation, at various levels, of the government and especially the District Collector Manju Rajpal (the NREGA Social Audit in Dungarpur district of Rajasthan was also conducted when she was the DC there). However, there was news floating around of how prior to the audit various sarpanches and officials had gotten together to oppose it, and had purposely stopped all worksites during the audit to make inspections more difficult to conduct.

Our team consisted mainly of Block Resource Personnel from the Udaipur area. The teams were flagged off by the Panchayati Raj Minister Mr. Bharat Singh. 11 Special teams were also sent to the various blocks to conduct in-depth audits where muster rolls, job cards, works undertaken etc were scrutinized with a fine-tooth comb. Since the rest of the teams were spending 1.5 days per panchayat, in-depth technical audits of the work carried out under the NREGS was not always possible. However -armed with mobile microphone’s, flags, banners and more importantly, the Management Information System files for the villages (which includes financial and work-related information on all Job cards, construction works etc conducted in the villages) – we set out into our 3 panchayats. Staying in the village school, walking around taking complaints on job card or payment irregularities, requesting villagers to have one or two team members over for meals, inspecting and writing reports on the quality and efficacy of the work sites, checking whether standard practices were being followed by the ‘mate’ ( worksite in-charge), meeting the village secretary and doing a full check of all records -bills, job card information , employment registers etc- relating to the NREGS were all carried out by each team.

Findings:

In general, worksites do not have boards with information on the amount of money spent on them (a requirement), workers are not divided into groups when working, are given more than the prescribed amount of work to earn Rs.100 a day ( and even then are not being paid the full rate) . In every village we went, workers were being paid the average rate, usually between 60-80%. Most mates were not properly trained on how to take measurements at worksites to judge each worker’s due.

Many job cards are not filled in properly. The payment column in job cards is usually missing. A majority of them are kept with the mate, a clear violation. Muster rolls have a lot of mistakes and things are crossed out, which is again against the rules. Information on payments made to job card holders and also on works in the village which are supposed to be displayed on the walls of the panchayat office are generally missing.

Form 6, which is to be used by those seeking employment, is basically never filled. Workers simply go and talk to the mate for work and he asks people to come by in an ad hoc fashion. This means that if they do not find work in 15 days, they are not eligible for unemployment insurance. In two villages people told us how some family members of the sarpanch were picking up payments for work but never show up. In fact, in Hurda block, the audit teams found 15% of job cards were forged. Of course, many people who are eligible for job cards don’t have them, and a large number of people had not received payments in over 3-4 months. In one extreme case in village Haled, someone who had applied for work and not received it for over 1.5 yrs received over Rs.4000 in unemployment insurance when this was discovered by the audit team. The worksites we inspected (mostly watershed management related) had been beneficial for animals in the area.

Knowledge of the public about their rights and entitlements under the NREGS is very poor. The teams walked around the villages spreading information and leaflets, talking to villagers about the same, but more needs to be done in this respect.

Reports from many villages came in that teams had to deal with sometimes unfriendly sarpanches and other village administration. In the village Bada Mahua we visited, the Sarpanch’s brother and loyalists constantly shadowed us as we made rounds through the village meeting people. As a result they were not willing to talk openly about issues they had. In fact, in the Aamli panchayat, around 50 sarpanch loyalists even slept in the school where the audit team was and interfered in their work. In Peepli village, the entire village administration work had been contracted out to one Madan Lal , a farmer, by the village secretary. Reecchda was one of the other villages assigned to us. Along with the illegal use of JCB (earth-digging) machines, we also uncovered financial fraud there. Apparently the ‘firm’ from which 6000 units of cement has been procured for a worksite was nothing more than the local cycle- repair shop!!

Several cases of untouchability practices were unearthed. Members of a certain caste were not allowed to sit under the shade provided at worksites or drink from the same vessel. Another major issue was that most procurement was done through ‘kuccha’ bills, with no CST, TIN or other tax /registration number for identification. Payments were made in cash which makes tracking problematic.

The audit was somewhat successful in its attempts at highlighting the problems within the implementation of the program -many FIRs were filed against officials, a lot of blocked payments were made, job cards issued and awareness created. Some of the useful recommendations that came out of this were the use of technology to overcome problems in payment using biometric methods (as done in parts of Andhra Pradesh), conducting social audits twice a year in all villages, adding photographs to passbooks to prevent any fraudulent handling of them, and most importantly the setting up of a social audit directorate within the Rajasthan government.

For more, see a recent article in the Hindu.

Abhijit Patnaik is Senior Researcher, Accountability Initiative

On Data, and its Relationship with Accountability and Transparency

Zainab Bawa

Notions of transparency and accountability have been evolving since late 1980s. It was advocated that people must be given information about budgets, especially details of heads where money was allocated and how it was spent. This would aid in enforcing transparency, accountability and participation. In the late 1990s, as cities developed, pressure on urban infrastructure increased and municipalities became unable to respond to people’s expectations owing to a variety of reasons. The prevalent view was that municipalities and local politicians are inefficient. Elected representatives were criticized for being corrupt and favouring their vote-banks by distributing city resources to them. It was also believed that use of discretionary powers perpetuates corruption. Contemporary accountability-transparency paradigm is aimed at making transparent to the public how and why discretion is exercised in different circumstances. This (presumably) will curb discretion as much as possible and tighten decision-making.

Publishing data in public domains as a way to enforce and enhance transparency and accountability has gained greater momentum in the current decade owing to the Right to Information (RTI) Act through which various kinds of information can be acquired. In this post, I am interested in exploring the concept of data to understand how accountability and transparency are reified by using data as a primary tool. With the help of examples, I will put forward the contention that what is presented as data is in fact produced through multiple histories and contexts. Organizing /interpreting data without an understanding of some of these histories can only enforce existing stereotypes and/or lead to oversight.

The Case of Discretionary Funds: In India, elected representatives are given discretionary funds annually. They can use this money, as per their discretion, to create infrastructure which will improve the condition of their constituencies. Information on how this money was spent has been gathered and made available in popular media. PRAJA Foundation has organized this information for Mumbai and has shown that most of the funds were spent on constructing community halls, anganwadis/crèches, toilets, roads and in the repairs of dilapidated buildings. It is evident that elected representatives have been spending part of the discretionary funds towards developing amenities for poorer populations in cities. This tends to get labeled as vote-bank politics. At the same time, this information is important for people residing in slums settlements so that they know of the claims they can make on their elected representatives.

Information of where and how discretionary funds were used cannot be interpreted holistically in the absence of geographical, historical, political, economic and social information about constituencies. Each area in the city has its own specificities. This implies that data have to be interpreted on the basis of local contexts. Moreover, administrative and institutional dynamics differ across the city. Further, some parts of the city are better endowed than others owing to age, location and patterns of urbanization. Here, we need to understand who institutes infrastructure, how much, for whom and who benefits from what. But these issues cannot be raised in the absence of contexts to the data. How then should data about the use of discretionary funds be presented? For now, it remains that discretion is exercised in particular social, economic and political contexts and therefore, presentation of latest data overlooks the historical, political and social context of constituencies in which various stakeholders and political actors are operating.

Data about Land Records: A few months ago, I met SL. He was running a garage in South Bangalore but he did not own it. One day, the owners asked him to vacate the premises. He decided to find out why he was asked to leave. The owners had invited a builder redevelop the property. SL decided to wage a legal battle to assert his claims. But he lost the case because the owners bribed the lawyer representing him. Thereafter, SL decided to find out the history of the land ownership to challenge the current owners. He found that the land was formerly part of a village. Later, different individuals and groups had reclaimed parts of the land from the nearby lake. Some of the historical records showed that at one point in time, the land belonged to the municipality but currently, it was being owned by private owners. The records which SL managed to obtain, through various means including RTI and by befriending clerks and junior officers in different administrative and planning departments, showed that at each point in time, different groups had owned, rented and/or used the land. This meant that ownership of the land was neither singular nor straightforward and that there were multiple claims on that single piece of land. SL’s findings that at a certain moment in history, the municipality was suddenly declared owner of the land put into jeopardy the ownership claims of the current owners.

SL’s story provides an interesting nuance for analyzing land record databases. Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto promoted the idea of developing national databases that contain information about transactions around every piece of land in the country. This would help to enforce the individual’s property rights. Around 1980s, new laws and regulations were being developed in India regarding land ownership and rights which individuals have over their properties. In this period, the government of Karnataka introduced legislation for regulating tenures and ownership of agricultural lands in order to transform the regime that existed in the colonial period and bring it up to date with the present. In 1990s, land records in rural Karnataka were digitized and a system was devised whereby farmers could now approach government offices in the taluks to procure copies of their land records. This system was known as Bhoomi. It was introduced to curb the petty corruption which agents and village accountants indulge in when they issue land record certificates to farmers. The goal of Bhoomi was to make the system of issuing land record certificates more efficient, transparent and accountable. However, such transparency led to drastic consequences for tenant farmers and small and marginal tillers and sharecroppers because their tenures and usufruct claims were not recognized under the new state legislation.

Information regarding ownership of land is rather sensitive because of the tremendous value associated with land and also because land in India is possessed and used under various arrangements known as tenure. Some tenure systems are recognized by government bodies but many others are not. This produces a condition of “illegality”. Further, ownership of land, as we have seen in SL’s case, is not only complicated but is also contested. This means that at any given point in time, those in positions of power and influence are able to exercise and fulfill their claims better than those who do not have the requisite political, social and economic capital. Besides this, there is never single and absolute ownership of land perpetually; possession and use of land changes hands of individuals, groups and political institutions from time to time. Databases and information repositories of land records and property transactions are situated in this highly fraught and political context. Moreover, as is evident from SL’s case, current land ownership data overlooks the multiple trajectories through which the present has been produced, i.e. there is no information about previous ownership and usufruct claims and about how the present has come to be the way it is today. But it is also rather difficult to obtain a thorough and exact account of such trajectories because official records can be fudged/appropriated/reproduced not only by the claimants but also by government officials. This is dependent on who is making what claims and which institution and/or group is more powerful in the conflict. Therefore attempts to make land transactions transparent by organizing information of past exchanges into databases can have negative consequences for those groups who do not have the resources and influence to defend their claims in the present.

My goal in citing this example is to show that data are located in temporal contexts i.e., data are produced and reproduced from time to time, by different groups and institutions, and that what is recorded as current data has several histories behind it which cannot be deciphered through streamlined databases. Data are also located in a political context – who produces what data, what is propagated as ‘information’ and who benefits/loses from the availability/publication of particular data are important questions for the accountability-transparency paradigm.

End Notes: I realize that this post is getting too long and that the discussion can be continued in further posts. However, before I conclude, it will be instructive to look into cases where data can have positive consequences for performance and accountability. In some cases, this impact may be known only in retrospect but it is useful to understand the process and to bear in the mind that sometimes, data presents a holistic picture only when reviewed over longer periods of time. In Mumbai, in 2003, a complaint management system was launched as a joint initiative of PRAJA Foundation and the municipality. The purpose of this system was to organize complaints (about civic issues) received through letters, telephone, fax, email and personal visits into one comprehensive system. This was known as the Online Complaint Management System (OCMS). Complaints were fed into this computerized system. Data regarding the resolution /non-resolution of complaints and pendency was also inputted into the system. OCMS also generated data about complaints made by citizens, top five complaints received in each month in every ward and performance of the wards in resolving complaints. OCMS thus enabled citizens and NGOs to monitor the working of the municipality and the ward offices.

In civic activism, negative perceptions of administration and government and long-held stereotypes influence the manner in which data is interpreted. The monthly complaints data was often used to shame the administration for non-performance and inefficiency. I will get into the details of the OCMS here. But it is interesting to note is that the complaints data in fact worked as a form of feedback for the administration. Four years after it had been implemented, the administration decided to take over the OCMS and to operate it unilaterally. The complaints data generated between 2003 and 2007 was collected and analyzed in PRAJA. The data about the nature of complaints made in every part of the city and the performance of each of the wards over the four-year period demonstrated that in some cases, some wards had actually managed to resolve certain complaint areas which had become chronic. At some points in time, repeated complaints about one or two issues had even alerted the administrative machinery which had managed to curb the issues in time before they could become chronic. Thus, the complaints data actually served as a form of feedback for the municipality.

To conclude then, data are situated within contexts. These contexts have been produced over time i.e., the present has come to be what it is today owing to many trajectories of the past. Therefore, data also needs to be organized and interpreted within the past and the present. Providing today’s data, whether it is weekly, monthly or annual, is only a partial account. Overlooking the histories which produced this present data can lead to short-sighted reading and action.

Zainab Bawa is a PhD student at Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore, and Research Fellow at Centre for Internet and Society.

Four Years of the RTI Act: Aspirations and Concerns

Shekhar Singh

As “RTI” turns four, it is yet another moment to reflect on our hopes from it and the worries we have. Unlike many other countries of the World, RTI in India was not a hesitant starter. People took to it like proverbial fish to water. Over 2 million applications were filed in just the first two and a half years, with a significant proportion (over 400,000) in rural areas. More impressively, the rate at which the number of applications is increasing is phenomenal and it would not be surprising if it doubles in the next one or two years. The term “RTI” has entered the Indian lexicon in a big way and is understood across languages and regions.

However, the success of an RTI Act cannot finally be judged on the number of applications filed. Certainly the first phase of the implementation requires growing awareness and enthusiasm, reflected through fast growing numbers of applications. But, soon, systemic solutions have to take over. Governments (and other public authorities) must recognize that this onslaught of RTI applications reveals a thirst in the public for information which they have for so long been deprived of. Even more disturbingly, it reveals a huge dissatisfaction with the way public authorities are functioning and dealing with the public and their grievances.

Therefore, our first aspiration is that public authorities start seriously reviewing the types of RTI applications being received and start putting out, proactively, the types of information that the public is regularly seeking. This would not only lower the pressure of RTI applications on the public authorities but also make it easier for people to access information without the travails of filing and pursuing applications.

They also need to analyse the reasons behind these applications – which are very often about unwarranted delays, arbitrary decisions, unfair action or apathy, inefficiency and indifference. As public authorities start making the required systemic changes to prevent such grievances from arising, many of the grievance related applications will cease.

If this does not happen, one concern is that the RTI regime will translate into an RTI divide – where those who file RTIs will get relief, often at the cost of those who do not or cannot, and consequently get even more ignored.

Another aspiration is that the bureaucracy will begin to realize that, despite some irritants and “misuse”, the RTI Act has the potential of transforming governance in a way that would not only make their work easier but would increase the credibility of governments. Unless this change comes, the concern is that RTI will remain a battlefield, with information providers fighting every inch to deny information to the information seekers – and neither side winning in the end.

Finally, the RTI Act has to be protected from all attacks. It is gratifying that there is so much interest among the government to weaken the Act – at least two attempts has been made to amend it and a third is now imminent. It is gratifying because it reassures us that we have finally got hold of an important right, one that hurts where it should. For, after all, this is the first law which does not further the control of the government over the people but gives some control to the people over the government.

However, the concern is that if the government succeeds in weakening the Act, even for a short while, they would give heart to the opponents and demoralize the people. They would open the doors to a gradual chipping away at the Act till finally it falls into line and becomes a farce, along with many other so-called pro-people legislations. This, clearly, cannot be allowed to happen.

Shekhar Singh is the founding member of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information and member of Right to Information Assessment and Analysis Group

Grama Swaraj in Karnataka: How is it going?

Jeffrey Hammer

Checking in on the ongoing Gram Swaraj project in northern Karnataka recently raised a few interesting questions, re-enforced some prejudices of mine and pointed out some trouble spots of which we should all be aware.

The Grama Swaraj Project (GSP) is simple: it gives each Grama Panchayat 5-7 lakhs rupees to do with as it sees fit. The main requirement for spending the money is to make sure a Grama Sabha takes place ahead of the Grama Panchayat meeting that decides what to do with the money. 5-7 lakhs doesn’t sound like much in comparison to, say, NREGA funds (whose use was intended to be decided the same way but, in Karnataka, usually isn’t) but these are often the only untied, fully discretionary funds a GP has. Lots of money flows through a bank account with the GP’s name on it but almost all of that is earmarked for specific uses (they have to pay the teacher, they have to fund the digging of borewells). GSP money can be used for anything except a very short list of forbidden items like religious buildings, guns, drugs and other obvious restrictions.

How’s it going? Well, formal evaluations are currently in progress but I can tell you what I saw and heard while visiting.

First off, there were no complaints about misuse of these funds. Mention NREGA and you’ll get an earful of complaints but mention Grama Swaraj and you’ll hear “oh, that’s working much better”. Now, it is fully possible that GSP involves such small sums that it’s not even worth the trouble for the usual suspects to go after them. A perfectly good question to ask is what would happen if local autonomy were granted for spending substantial chunks of money. The sharks could certainly rise to that bait. But, so far, that hasn’t been an issue.

Second, people seem genuinely pleased to be able to fund items that would be too small for the relevant line ministry to even think about but which make a big difference in the lives of villages. In northern Karnataka, water and sanitation are perennial issues (even before this year’s disappointing monsoon) and these were common areas for the use of these funds.

Third, the technical quality of the work appears to be much higher under GSP than NREGA. Roads that look several years old and are an inch or two thick (checked scientifically by kicking at the edges of the road and seeing what pops up – literally) built within the past few months under NREGA auspices were noticeably worse than those built with the GP’s own money. NREGA funds are supposed to be their own money, too, but no one seemed to feel responsible for how that money was spent. In contrast, money that was perfectly transparent in the amount spent and the purpose to which it was put in GSP yielded solidly built and usable infrastructure.

So, is everything going just fine? Does this devolution of purchasing autonomy solve everything? Well, no – some problems are clearly worth worrying about.

The first is the interference of higher levels of government and bureaucratic processes that, actually, were not allowed under the design of the project. So, for example, one village wanted more public toilets. They figured, given that water was in very short supply, that covered pits were the most appropriate. There are plenty of designs for safe covered pit toilets. However, the Junior Engineer, with support from district health authorities, said they had to have a water-intensive septic tank system. This made the village change their minds (they knew they couldn’t spare the water for this) but they were not allowed to change projects though there is nothing in the program that should have prevented them changing their minds. So there is a lakh’s worth of well constructed but useless sanitation infrastructure sitting in the village. Local decisions were fully accountable. District and state decisions were not. Local discretion could have saved lives from water borne illness. State rules stopped it from happening.

So that I don’t sound too much like an advocate for local autonomy: the second problem is one of “too much” local discretion. Those good GSP roads with proper drainage ditches along the side we saw in a village in Gulbarga district stopped right in front of a little settlement of Scheduled Caste residents. Even with only the light early monsoon rains, the hamlet required stepping carefully to avoid puddles caused by those good-looking roads. The standing water is a health hazard for the SC residents of the village. Local autonomy doesn’t solve the problem of caste. That’s going to require checks and balances between governments than mere devolution of investment decisions won’t be able to handle.

But at least there will be roads in the village for a few years to come.

I’ll get back to you to report whether these observations are supported by systematic research or not. For the time being, it’s food for thought.

Jeffrey Hammer is Visiting Professor in Economic Development at Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University

Going Nowhere on Human Development

The latest Human Development Report released yesterday (5th October 2009) is depressing for every Indian. The Report ranks countries – 180 in total – in terms of three basic indicators of human development: per capita GDP (adjusted for purchasing power of the local currency), literacy rate and life expectancy at birth. They are meant to capture at an aggregate level the well-being of people in a particular country in terms of income, education and health. India ranks 134, below Bhutan and Laos, and just above Solomon Islands and Congo. This should be reason enough for the nation as a whole, and especially the politicians, bureaucrats and policy makers, to hang their heads in shame.

The usual practice of the apologists is to say that the rankings themselves are unfair – that the HDR does not take into account factors such as democracy, freedom of press, rule of law and other aspects of governance that India prides itself with. But the fact of the matter is that there has been no change in our HDI rank since last year, and a decline in the rank from the beginning of this decade. So, while in absolute terms the HDI index has increased by a few percentage points, our relative performance compared to other countries has become worse. At the same time, China’s HDI rank has gone up seven places in just one year – from 99 in 2006 to 92 in the latest one.

The data also shows that India’s GDP per capita rank is in fact higher than the combined HDI rank – 128 as compared to 134. This is even more worrying because the usual excuse of linking low human development and poverty does not strictly hold. The comparative figure for Sri Lanka is 14 and China 10, indicating that these countries did better at education and health than their comparative per capita GDP ranking suggests.

It is time to ask the hard questions: why is India going nowhere in human development in spite of large allocations to education, health and livelihood security? Why are flagship programs like SSA, NRHM and NREGA not delivering improvements in our comparative performance vis-à-vis other (supposedly much poorer) countries of the world? Why is there no revulsion at the complete impunity and lack of accountability of the political and administrative machinery using tax payers’ money for noble purposes such as education and health? What does it mean for our long-term standing in the world community? In short, who is (are) accountable for this dismal state of affairs and what is being done to fix this?

P.S. India’s HDI rank is common both in G20 and BRICs group of nations – LAST!!

Dr. Anit Mukherjee is a Fellow at National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi

Gram Nyayalayas: a cause for optimism?

Union Law Minister M V Moily recently announced that 200 gram nyayalayas will be operational by October 2nd 2009. This initiative is taken under the 2008 Gram Nyayalayas Act. The Law Ministry envisions setting up some 5000 gram nyayalayas across India over the next three years, with the hope to fundamentally reshape the lower judiciary in India. The 2008 bill states that eventually every intermediate (i.e. block) panchayat will have a gram nyayalaya. The gram nyayalayas will then form the new lowest layer to the Indian judicial system and the first point of contact for many, if not most Indians. If fully implemented, it is here that the majority of legal disputes in India will be resolved. Who will be these Nyayadhikaris, will there be enough of them to significantly bring down the estimated 30,000,000 cases currently pending in the judicial system, and will they be accountable?

In the 2008 bill it states that these Nyayadhikaris’ qualifications are that of a first class judicial officer, or essentially just a lawyer. He or she will be appointed by the state government in consultation with the High Court in the state. In essence, the imagined recruitment pool is young lawyers, not particularly well trained, aspiring to be magistrates and then later district court judges. Although they may not be seasoned lawyers when they start, many of the problems they encounter won’t be that complicated and if paid well enough the job could start attracting some talented young lawyers. It will be critical to watch over the coming months and years the quality of lawyers being appointed and what sort of prestige the position gains, which will influence the ability to attract future talent. However, given the low quality level of some (but certainly not all) judicial magistrates, session court judges, etc. there is definitely reason to worry that these appointees may not have the skills necessary to do the job and be susceptible to corruption.

Tempering these concerns though, Nyayadhikaris can only impose a sentence of up to two years and the amount they can fine or grant in a civil case is capped as well. The District Court judge is given the responsibility to appoint a judicial officer to inspect Gram Nyayalayas in their district at least every six months. Both these measures are designed to limit the potential harm corrupt or incompetent Nyayadhikaris could do.

A party can appeal the Nyayadhikaris verdict to a sessions court judge for criminal matters which must be decided by that judge within 30 days. For Civil matters it goes to the District Court which must decide it within 6 months. Vitally, the Bill states there is no appeal past this stage (except in cases that involve a claim of a constitutional violation). Effectively, for almost all matters a Gram Nyayalaya can hear there is only one additional appeal you can make afterwards. This appeal is to the judicial officers who in the current system are generally the first to hear a case. Another layer to the judicial system has been added to screen off matters of perceived smaller importance and limit the ability of affected persons to appeal and clog the system at the High Courts and Supreme Court.

This system could work effectively if both the Gram Nyayalayas and the subordinate judges these cases will be appealed to were competent and clean from corruption. Yet, the track record for the subordinate judiciary in India is not perceived to be strong on either of these fronts. The worry is that persons will have fines or criminal sentences improperly imposed against them and find that their avenues for appeal have been shut past these often low level subordinate judicial officers. Even if the sessions court or district court judge is very talented, the time limits imposed for resolving an appeal may mean they can’t give the attention to a case it deserves and so leave many cases of injustice done by Gram Nyayalayas untouched. Two years’ imprisonment may not be the same as the death penalty or life imprisonment, but it’s still a long time to be wrongly put in jail. Similarly, even moderate fines can destroy many families’ savings in India.

Finally, even if all 5,000 Nyayadhikaris are appointed over three years, this still may not be enough to bring India’s judicial backlog under control. To give one a sense of the scale of this endeavor there are currently about 650 working High Court judges and almost 14,000 district judges, assistant district judges, magistrates and other judicial officers in the rest of the subordinate judiciary. Almost all observers agree that there simply aren’t enough judges in India for the cases currently in the system. Further, many observers think Indians don’t litigate enough – i.e. there are many cases of wrongs that should be litigated that aren’t brought to the courts because of the clogged courts. 5,000 Nyayadhikaris is substantial, but probably not enough to take on all the current cases or the cases that aren’t being brought yet should be.

Despite these concerns, we should watch the development of Gram Nyayalayas not only with some degree of skepticism, but also optimism. If the Act is well-implemented and taken in step with broader efforts to strengthen the lower judiciary, Nyayadhikaris could prove vital in bringing the rule of law to millions of Indians.

Nick Robinson is a Visiting Fellow at Centre for Policy Research, and teaches at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore